Our research focuses on design, deployment and evaluation of computer systems for community health. 

Continued work on the Health@Home and ARCHIR projects have included looking at how we can better understand consumer health information management in the household and what community health information resources are available to consumers.  Recent works from this project include:

Example photographs of health information found in the home, from the Health@Home project:

Abstracts:

Zayas-Cabán, T., Douglas, S. & Brennan, P. F. Inclusive Information Systems Design: Assessing the Needs of Underrepresented Groups. MedInfo 2004: 11th World Congress on Medical Informatics.

Brennan, P. F., & Hsieh, Y. G. (July 2004). Health@Home: Family Structure, Technology, and Home Health Information Management. Paper presented at the Sigma Theta Tau 15th International Research Congress, Dublin, Ireland.

Moen, A. & Marquard, J.  What do Consumers do with Health Information at Home? (2004, June 21-23).  Tromsø Telemedicine and eHealth Conference, Tromsø, Norway.

Publications:

Moen, A., Gregory, J., Brennan, P.F. (2004). Cross-cultural Factors necessary to enable Design of flexible Consumer Health Informatics Systems, Presented at IT in Health Care 2004: Sociotechnical Approaches To Err is system, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Another project, IADL, has involved partnering with a community planning group and helping them set up a digital library of health information.  This digital library can be found at djhelp.info.  Recent works from this project include:

Presentations:

Brennan, P.F. (2004). Community-wide Information Systems Design: Concepts and an Illustration, Presented at MedInfo 2004: 11th World Congress on Medical Informatics, San Fancisco, California, USA.

In HeartCare2, we have partnered with Aurora Health Systems to build a web-based communication and support service for VNA nurses to use to help patients with congestive heart failure better handle their symptoms.  This project is a continuation of the HeartCare project, a web based information and support system for patients recovering from coronary artery bypass surgery.

Recent projects have expanded our work to include looking at the development of local health information infrastructures.  In the NMESH project, we are performing an independent evaluation of a multi-institutional network for the sharing of patient-controlled medical records.

Our work is currently funded by Intel Corporation, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Library of Medicine (NLM). Our industry partners are Aurora Health Systems (Milwaukee), Children's Hospital of Boston, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We have collaborative research projects with CHESS, the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Nursing, and WISELI (Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Initiative).