[Air-l] FWD: Call for Participation: "IT in Health Care: Socio-technical Approaches"

[adams at bmg.eur.nl]

Dear Colleague,

We invite you to participate in "IT in Health Care: Socio-technical
Approaches, Second International Conference," September 13-14, 2004,
in Portland, Oregon. Details of the conference and abstract submission
process are now available on the conference website:
http://www.ohsu.edu/dmice/ithc2004.

Please share this message with anyone who you think may be interested; our
apologies if you receive multiple copies.


Paul Gorman and Jos Aarts, Co-Chairs

for the ITHC 2004 Organizing Committee

gormanp at ohsu.edu
j.aarts at bmg.eur.nl

====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.