[AK-MI] ITHC2004 conference on socio-technical approaches: call for participation

[Elske Ammenwerth]

Call for Participation

We invite you to participate in "IT in Health Care: Socio-technical 
Approaches, Second International Conference," September 13-14, 2004, in 
Portland, Oregon. Building on the successes of the first ITHC conference in 
Rotterdam in September, 2001, ITHC 2004 will again focus on the complex 
interaction of the social and technical aspects of information system 
design, implementation, and evolution in health care. The conference is 
hosted by the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology 
at Oregon Health & Science University, and takes place immediately 
following MEDINFO 2004.

The aim of the conference is to bring together investigators from diverse 
fields concerned with the interaction and interdependence of information 
technologies and the social and work contexts within which they are 
deployed. The conference will be of modest size to promote informal 
interchange among participants, in addition to the plenary speakers and 
formal paper presentations that are scheduled.  Selected papers from the 
conference are to be published in a special issue of the International 
Journal of Medical Informatics.

The first ITHC conference in Rotterdam focused on 'sociotechnical' 
approaches: "approaches that consider 'social' and 'technical' aspects as 
inextricably intertwined, and as equally important in information systems 
design, implementation and evaluation."  In the second we hope to extend 
this theme with a focus on the system, and how safety, among other things, 
is an emergent property of the system as a whole. The conference theme "To 
Err is System" is thus intended to reflect three differing perspectives:

1.  The pervasive view that technological failures are due to technological 
system issues - "if, only we had had the latest version, higher bandwidth, 
a better systemŠ"

2.  The socio-technical perception that health informatics is fraught with 
difficulties due to a lack of awareness and understanding of the 
socio-cultural environment in which such applications are implemented;

3.  The systems view that health care is produced through interaction of 
the people, technologies, and processes of care, and that changes in one of 
these elements produce further, sometimes unexpected, changes in the other 
elements or in their interactions.


Key Dates

Deadline for submission abstracts     16 February 2004
Notification of acceptance            12 April    2004
Deadline for final papers              2 August   2004

More information at http://www.ohsu.edu/dmice/ithc2004.


Endorsed by

American Medical Informatics Association
People and Organizational Issues Working Group, Kimberly Harris, Chair

International Medical Informatics Association,
Working Group 13: Organizational and Social Issues, Bonnie Kaplan, Chair

European Federation for Medical Informatics
Working Group on Organisational Impact in Medical Informatics, Jos Aarts,
Chair
-- 
**********************************************
Paul Gorman, MD
Associate Professor
Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology Oregon 
Health and Sciences University 
3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road Portland, Oregon, 97239 USA

503 494-4025 (office)
503 795-8921 (pager)
503 494-4551 (fax)

gormanp at ohsu.edu
**********************************************