AIHI Seminar Series 2016 - Associate Professor Craig Kuziemsky

As more healthcare delivery is provided via collaborative healthcare teams there is a need to understand how collaboration works so we can better design information and communication technology (ICT) to support it.

However, designing for collaboration introduces multiple types of challenges including data, process, social, organizational and workflow issues. While technological innovations such as Web 2.0 provide great potential for supporting collaborative healthcare delivery, we know that technology must be aligned with the various contexts or “spaces” where it is used.

While the need for collaboration is well stated, far less thought is given to the structures and behaviours that define collaboration spaces. This presentation will discuss my research on studying and defining the collaboration space and its implications on the design and evaluation of ICTs to support collaboration.

Dr. Craig Kuziemsky, PhD, is an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Health Systems Program in the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on developing new approaches for modelling collaborative healthcare delivery so we can better design information and communication technology (ICT) to support different contexts of collaboration. His work has defined the structural aspects necessary to support collaboration as well as the behavioural and social processes that shape how the structural components work. His studies of collaboration have used concepts such as complexity theory to understand the nature of collaborative interactions in different healthcare settings (clinical healthcare and public health for disaster management).

Dr. Kuziemsky is also interested in the different contexts in which collaboration occurs and how these contexts influence ICT design and evaluation.

Dr. Kuziemsky was awarded the University of Ottawa 2013 Young Researcher Award in Social Sciences and Humanities. He is the current chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Working Group on Organizational and Social Issues. Dr. Kuziemsky has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He is the Principal Investigator for a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant (2014-2019) to study contextual aspects of collaborative teamwork in order to better model and develop technologies to support different contexts of collaboration.