Health Care, Trust, and High Technology

Medical Informatics systems must "Keep No Secrets and Tell No Lies"

(Palo Alto, CA) How many times have you been asked the same question over and over when seeking medical care? According to a prominent physician involved in designing patient information systems, this is because clinicians distrust information obtained by others. Michael G. Kahn, M.D., Ph.D, will discuss a Clinical Information System he designed to overcome this lack of trust in a Health Care keynote address at the CHI 98 conference on computers and human factors. His presentation is titled "Keep No Secrets and Tell No Lies: Computer Interfaces in Clinical Care."

Kahn emphasizes that "physicians have special needs for data presentation. Systems must reveal all that is known about patients, including recent changes." Such systems must also display any flaws in the data: that is, they must not tell lies. Kahn notes that "these are hard problems, and there are few human-computer interface professionals working on them." User interface designers must participate in the development of these systems to ensure that they show information in the correct order and context, and so that the physician can be alerted to any possible problems in the data.

This is an increasingly urgent problem to solve. Janette Coble, CHI 98 Chair for the Health Care Domain, notes that it is "critically important that health care systems of all kinds (from medical devices to patient care delivery tracking systems) be well designed from a user interface perspective. Helping members of the health care community become aware of the important gains from HCI application to health care systems is a critical first step towards making health systems more effective and safe for practitioners and patients alike." Dr. Kahn's presentation will serve as a call to action for Human-Computer Interface professionals in both academia and industry.

CHI is the premier worldwide forum for the exchange of information on all aspects of how people interact with computers. The annual conference features a full program of presentations, tutorials and vendor exhibits. Participants from academia, industry, health care and the arts come from around the world. CHI conferences are sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM)'s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The CHI conference is traditionally supported by industry organizations. The CHI 98 corporate sponsors include: Citibank, IBM, Microsoft Usability, Nokia, Sun Microsystems and Unisys.

The theme for 1998 is "Making the Impossible Possible." Approximately 2,500 participants will examine the future of human-computer interaction from 18-23 April in Los Angeles, CA at the Los Angeles Convention Center.