Human-Centered Design for Health Information Technology

This chapter presents issues that may arise in human-centered research in health care environments. The authors first discuss why human-centered approach is increasingly employed to study and to design health care technology. They then present some practical concerns that may arise when conducting qualitative research in medical settings, from research design, to data collection and data analysis, and to technology design. Many of these concerns were also experienced in their own human-centered field studies conducted in the last few years. The authors conclude the chapter by illustrating some of these issues using their own research case study that investigated nurses’ information flow in a hospital ward.