Distributed Cognition in Healthcare

Jiajie Zhang is a cognitive scientist working in healthcare and a professor of health informatics at University of Texas at Houston. Zhang will be the moderator and discussant for this symposium. He will provide an overview of distributed cognition and its importance in healthcare. Distributed cognition provides a unique framework to describe the dynamics, interactions, processes, and knowledge structures critical to cognitive tasks in healthcare environment. It allows researchers to focus on complex informational, social, organizational, and cognitive issues involved in team interactions with information technologies within a distributed, collaborative environment. The core unit of analysis is the functional system composed of human and artificial agents and their relations which are distributed across time and space dimensions (Cohen et al., in review; Hutchins, 1995; Zhang & Norman, 1994). Distributed cognition can lead to discoveries concerning how interactions between agents are coordinated and how artifacts and tools are really used.