A Primer on Aspects of Cognition for Medical Informatics
- Affiliations of the authors: Columbia University, New York, New York (VLP); McGill University, Montreal, Canada (JFA); and; University of California–Berkeley, California (DRK)
- Correspondence and reprints: Vimla L. Patel, PhD, Department of Medical Informatics, Vanderbilt Clinic Building, 5th Floor, Columbia University, 622 West 168th Street, New York, NY 10032; e-mail: <patel{at}dmi.columbia.edu>
- Received 19 January 2000
- Accepted 23 February 2001
Abstract
As a multidisciplinary field, medical informatics draws on a range of disciplines, such as computer science, information science, and the social and cognitive sciences. The cognitive sciences can provide important insights into the nature of the processes involved in human– computer interaction and help improve the design of medical information systems by providing insight into the roles that knowledge, memory, and strategies play in a variety of cognitive activities. In this paper, the authors survey literature on aspects of medical cognition and provide a set of claims that they consider to be important in medical informatics.
Footnotes
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This work was supported in part by grant 239-07 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant 215-37 from the Medical Research Council of Canada, grant N01-LM-3343 from the National Library of Medicine, and High Performance Computing and Communications contract LM34514.
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↵* This paper is built around a set of claims. We use the term “claims” to denote hypotheses that have been subjected to repeated empirical testing. Claims have less epistemic force than “assertions” or “principles,” in that they are subject to revision or refutation.
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↵† We do not claim that this hierarchic representation is the only way in which physicians organize medical knowledge. In fact, physicians have access to clinical exemplars and “deep” biomedical knowledge, which provide alternative forms of representation.
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↵‡ This presupposes that diagnosis is the purpose of the interview. We recognize that EMRs are used for a wide range of tasks.
