Vimla L. Patel

Vimla L. Patel
Born Fiji Fiji
Nationality Canada Canadian
Fields Health Informatics
Cognitive Psychology
Institutions McGill University
Columbia University
UT Houston
ASU
New York Academy of Medicine
Alma mater University of Otago
McGill University
Doctoral students Andre Kushniruk
David R Kaufman
Trevor Cohen
Jan Horsky
Other notable students Marco Ramoni
Known for Cognitive science methods applied to understanding physician’s reasoning
International Health
Decision making and Medical errors
Human factors and health information technology
Notable awards Fellow, Royal Society of Canada
Fellow, ACMI
Fellow, New York Academy of Medicine

Vimla Lodhia Patel, is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist.

In the past decade, Dr. Patel has worked in the area of biomedical informatics, in particular studying the mediating roles of technology on performance. Her work includes studies of medical errors and error reduction in emergency care and other critical medical environments, (including telephone triage). Her past work in health cognition includes studies of risk-taking behavior and sexual decision making as it pertains to HIV in youth and adolescents. Her current work focuses mostly on identifying underlying cognition in medical error and learning.

Biography and career

Dr. Patel was born in Fiji and obtained a degree in biochemistry and microbiology from University of Otago in New Zealand, and MA and PhD in Educational Psychology (Medical Cognition,1980,1981) from McGill University in Montreal, where she also served as professor of Medicine and Psychology and director of the Centre for Medical Education. She was a founding member of HEALnet (Health Evidence Application and Linkage Network), which made seminal contributions furthering informatics research and application in Canada. She was also a member of the InterMed Collaboratory, which developed guidelines for medical decision support, and has done extensive work in India, Africa, and Colombia in cross-cultural cognition research.

In 2000 she became director of the Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Making in the department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, where she was also faculty in the department of Psychiatry and Teacher's College. From 2007-09, she served as interim chair and vice chair of Department of BMI at Arizona State University. Dr. Patel was a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas at Houston from 2009-11.As of November 2011, Dr.Patel joined the New York Academy of Medicine as a Senior Research Scientist and is the head of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health and is an adjunct professor of Biomedical informatics at Columbia University in NY.

Research

In 1978 Elstein, Shulman and Sprafka[1] applied cognitive science methods to investigate physicians’ clinical competence, developing a model of hypothetico-deductive reasoning which proposed that physicians reason by generating and testing a set of hypotheses to explain clinical data. This is an example of backward (hypothesis-to-data) reasoning. In 1986, Patel and Groen[2] demonstrated that experts who accurately diagnosed complex clinical problems used forward reasoning (data to hypothesis), in contrast to novice subjects who used backward reasoning and misdiagnosed or partially diagnosed the same problems.

Patel also applied text comprehension methods to understanding the use of clinical practice guidelines with the goal of increasing adoption of best practices.[3] Patel and colleagues have recently argued for new paradigm for error studies, where instead of zero error tolerance, detection and correction of potential error is viewed as an integral part of cognitive work in a complex workplace.[4]

She is the author of more than 300 publications in cognitive psychology, biomedical informatics, medical education and related fields.

Honors

Publications

References

  1. ↑ Elstein, A.S., Shulman, L.S., and Sprafka, S.A. Medical Problem-Solving: An Analysis of Clinical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.
  2. ↑ Patel, V.L. & Groen, G.J. (1986) Knowledge-based solution strategies in medical reasoning. Cognitive Science, 10, 91-116.
  3. ↑ Patel, V.L., Kaufman, D.R. (2006) Cognitive Science and Biomedical Informatics. - E.H. Shortliffe & J.J. Cimino (Eds.) Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine. New York: Springer-Verlag. P176.
  4. ↑ Patel, V.L., Cohen, T., Murarka, T., Olsen, J., Kagita, S., Myneni, S., Ghaemmaghami, V., (2010) Recovery at the Edge of Error: Debunking the Myth of the Infallible Expert. Journal of Biomedical Informatics.
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