Jeremiah Scholl

I conduct reseach within socio-technical design, Participatory design, CSCW, HCI, Pervasive computing, Mobile communication, Media spaces, Personal Health Records, Electronic Health Records, Telemedicine and ICT4D.

I have a background in Computer Networking, HCI, and CSCW. Rather than focusing on a specific class of systems (i.e. video conferencing), or specific clinical area (i.e. surgery) I specialize on using a specific approach to investigating new and improved systems.

More specifically I focus on a socio-technical design approach where technical and social aspects of systems are investigated and developed concurrently. I draw highly from the vision of CSCW researcher Mark Ackerman. I try to explore, understand, and hopefully ameliorate the social-technical gap, described as the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically.

The primary tools I utilize in this process are ethnographic design, participatory design, and iterative prototyping. More plainly, I observe and talk to people that will use systems, design new systems together with these people, and then build and rebuild these systems to meet their needs.

This approach is increasingly advocated within Health Informatics due to the complexity of healthcare organizations, the need for custom built systems, and high failure rate of these systems due to user and staff resistance. It can be applied to any class of systems, and in any work context.

It requires multidisciplinary knowledge including organizational theory developed within CSCW and Health Informatics, as well as technical understanding. In this respect I spent the first half of my professional development mainly focused on developing technical skills, including software development skills, and the latter half gaining knowledge of relevant usability issues, and organizational theory, including conducting user studies, and ethnographic field work.

I try to stay aware of relevant trends in social and technical areas so, for example, I can help meet evolving needs related to new trends such as Integrated Care and Quality of Care, and also can utilize new technical knowledge as it is developed within computer science.

Some of the most recent problems I have focused on include mobile communication tools that utilize context-awareness for better handing interruptions, EPR systems in India, phone messaging systems for low infrastructure areas based on Delay Tolerant Networking, and PHR systems provided by hospitals to patients via USB stick.