Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an inflection point, bringing heightened awareness around the preparedness and resilience of public health systems in dealing with severe shocks. While the pandemic has...
Tag: healthcare
Human API as a Research Source in Health Care
This paper illustrates how the concept of “Human API” can help post-treatment cancer patients with challenges they face once they are released from the hospital. The results and implications of this semester long graduate project will help illuminate how the Human API through its various data...
Can I Get a Witness? The Limits of Evidence in Healthcare Quality Evaluation Systems in American Hospitals
“I got verbals, but verbals don’t hold up in court….I need it in black and white.” After Sheila submits hospital quality data to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), reports indicate that her data hasn’t been received. She makes countless calls to the CMS Help Desk to get answers....
“Hey, the water cooler sent you a joke!”: ‘Smart’, Pervasive and Persuasive Ethnography
Article 6 in the series Data, Design and Civics: Ethnographic Perspectives How must we conjure up smart spaces? ‘Smart city’ has become an over-indulged urban metaphor, whipping up an apparition of dispersed, highly networked and interconnected socio-economic, infrastructural and communication...
Mobility is More than a Device: Understanding Complexity in Health Care with Ethnography
This case study on mobility in health care demonstrates how ethnography and design research helped Intel meet the business challenge of redressing market share. Ethnography enabled the team to assess the interplay between mobile devices and other hospital technologies, understand how they fit...
The Stakes of Uncertainty: Developing and Integrating Machine Learning in Clinical Care
The wide-spread deployment of machine learning tools within healthcare is on the horizon. However, the hype around “AI” tends to divert attention toward the spectacular, and away from the more mundane and ground-level aspects of new technologies that shape technological adoption and integration....
Architecture Can Heal: Spatial Literacy to Protect COVID-19 Healthcare Workers
In April 2020, a study of The Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City was conducted to better understand the challenge of adapting idealized infection control design guides to site-specific conditions during a pandemic. The study aimed to capture quick interventions that are working, offer a new...
ReHumanizing Hospital Satisfaction Data: Text Analysis, the Lifeworld, and Contesting Stakeholders’ Beliefs in Evidence
Case Study—Declining clinician engagement, increasing rates of burnout, and stagnant patient and family experience scores have led hospital leadership at Seattle Children's Hospital to submit requests to a data scientist and an anthropologist to identify key themes of survey comments and provide...
Getting from Vision to Reality: How Ethnography and Prototyping Can Solve Late-Stage Design Challenges
Cast Study—In 2014, Kaiser Permanente began implementing a next-generation medical office model that reimagines the outpatient care experience, combining new architecture, workflow, and technology to create a more convenient experience for patients and a connected, efficient experience for staff...
Who and What Drives Algorithm Development: Ethnographic Study of AI Start-up Organizational Formation
The focus of this paper is to investigate deep learning algorithm development in an early stage start-up in which edges of knowledge formation and organizational formation were unsettled and contested. We use a debate by anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss to examine these...