People, Ideas, and Machines (Video Available)
Speaker: Enrico Coiera, PhD, Director of the Centre for Health Informatics at Australian Institute of Health Innovation
In an age where technology appears to rule supreme, it is easy to forget that our relationship with technology is complicated. Just as humans shape technology, it shapes us in return. It is also easy to only see things through the lens of the technologies we have to hand, and build solutions that ill fit reality. Electronic health records for example demand that clinical work bends to the needs of documentation, with the end result being burnt out clinicians who do anything but what they were taught at medical school. Algorithms built with our cleverest machine learning methods just end up making concrete the biases implicit in their data sets. Seeing human systems like healthcare as sociotechnical systems helps us understand these unintended consequences, and gives us a different lens to understand technology design and use.
Trained in medicine and with a computer science PhD in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Dr. Coiera has a research background in both industry and academia and a strong international research reputation for his work on decision support and communication processes in biomedicine. Dr. Coiera spent 10 years at the prestigious Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories in Bristol UK where he led numerous health technology projects. He has overseen the development and trial of multiple eHealth interventions, including the Healthy.me consumer system as well as clinical decision support systems. Healthy.me technologies underpin a new US health startup called Healthbanc. His textbook Guide to Health Informatics is in its 3rd edition, is widely used internationally, and is translated into several languages. Dr. Coiera has won a number of prestigious awards including the 2015 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) François Grémy Award for Excellence and the 2011 UNSW Inventor of the year (Information and Communication Technology) for a literature-based computational discovery system. He was elected Foundation Fellow and first President of the Australian College of Health Informatics, is a foundation member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and an International Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Coiera has also held key appointments on boards, councils and editorial positions on international journals including Associate Editor of the journal ‘Artificial Intelligence in Medicine’.
