Wanda Pratt: Using Design Thinking to Improve Patient Safety

Date: 

Monday, January 30, 2017, 11:30am to 1:00pm

Location: 

MD 119

Abstract: Recent studies indicate that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States. Although this problem has received substantial national attention, very little work has actively involved patients in preventing, detecting, and recovering from these errors. In this presentation, I will detail our efforts to use design thinking to support patients and their caregivers in playing an active role to safeguard their own health in the hospital. Currently, patients receive inadequate information and support to play such a safeguarding role. Using mixed methods approaches, we have assessed the information needs of hospitalized patients, and created new technology designs and insights for how to address those needs. These insights will support the health-care community in engaging patients as safeguards against medical errors and provide a vision for enhancing the overall patient experience using information technology.

pratt Bio: Dr. Wanda Pratt is a Professor in the Information School with an adjunct appointment in Biomedical & Health Informatics in the Medical School at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on understanding patients’ needs and designing new technologies to address those needs. She has worked with people coping with a variety of chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. Dr. Pratt has received best paper awards from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and the Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology (JASIS&T). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft. Dr. Pratt is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. In addition, she is on the Board of Directors for AMIA, and Chaired their 2016 Annual Symposium.