Vimla L. Patel

Vimla Lodhia Patel, PhD, is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist. She pioneered the use of cognitive science methods and theories in research pertaining to medical problem-solving. In addition, she has devoted many years to understanding the nature of biomedical knowledge and its use in clinical practice. Dr. Patel has also worked extensively on matters of lay health cognition in diverse sociocultural contexts. This research contributes to a scientific foundation for medical and health education, particularly in medical decision-making. Much of her work has been conducted within the context of the study of medical expertise, an approach that examines development and changes in performance as a result of training and experience. Dr. Patel has also conducted research understanding the relative strengths of traditional versus problem-based learning approaches in medical education. This work has contributed to the modification of the curricula at medical schools using either approach.

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 most recent work in health cognition includes studies of risk-taking behavior and sexual decision making as it pertains to HIV in youth and adolescents. She has been influential in advancing the recognition of the importance of cognitive psychology in the study of biomedical informatics and related medical domains.

Biography and career

Dr. Patel was born in Fiji and obtained a degree in biochemistry and microbiology from University of Otago in New Zealand (1976), 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 [http://nce.nserc.ca/media/newsrel/archives/090299_e.htm 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 [http://www.smi.stanford.edu/projects/intermed-web/Home.htm 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. She was appointed in the [http://sci.asu.edu/about/bmi.php Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI)] , at Arizona State University in 2007 as interim chair, moving from Columbia University. As of January 2008 she is the Vice-Chair and Professor in BMI at [http://www.asu.edu ASU] . She is also Professor of Basic Medical Sciences in the University of Arizona, [http://www.medicine.arizona.edu/ College of Medicine] , Phoenix (in partnership with ASU). She is also the director of the [http://cognitive.asu.edu Center of Decision Making and Cognition] , in BMI, ASU.

Research

In 1978 Elstein, Shulman and Sprafka [Elstein, A.S., Shulman, L.S., and Sprafka, S.A. Medical Problem-Solving: An Analysis of Clinical Reasoning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978.] 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 [Patel, V.L. & Groen, G.J. (1986) Knowledge-based solution strategies in medical reasoning. Cognitive Science, 10, 91-116.] 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. This finding challenged the hypothetico-deductive model, which did not differentiate between reasoning patterns of experts and non-experts.

In her many studies of medical expertise, Dr. Patel has studied a range of phenomena pertaining to the organization of knowledge, recall and comprehension of clinical case materials, patterns of inference and the effects of medical training on long term medical performance. She has worked extensively on problems pertaining to international health. This work was exemplified by her studies with Sivaramakrishnan on Indian mothers’ beliefs about childhood nutritional disorders and how it impacted their decision making. [Sivaramakrishnan M, Patel VL. Reasoning about childhood nutritional deficiencies by mothers in rural India: a cognitive analysis. Soc Sci Med 1993;37(7):937-52.] Dr. Patel also applied text comprehension methods to understanding the use of clinical practice guidelines with the goal of increasing adoption of best practices. [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.]

Her other research interests include: comprehension of medical information; decision-making among health professionals and lay people; medical errors in the workplace for patient care and critical care decisionmaking; socio-cognitive studies of patient safety and human-computer interaction; cognitive assessment of learning and instruction; distributed cognition and scientific collaboration in medicine and health.

Dr. Patel has worked as a consultant to the World Bank where she studied problems in project failure and its relationship to staff training, cross-cultural communication and economic decisionmaking, as well as consulting for WHO, UNICEF, CIDA and foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundations. She is on the editorial boards of several journals in biomedical informatics and Health Sciences.

She is the author of more than 250 publications in cognitive psychology, biomedical informatics, medical education and related fields.

Honors

* Member, Clinical Research Review Committee, The National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). 2007
* Selected for "Marquis Who’s Who in the World". 2007
* Member, Committee on Opportunities in Basic Research in the Behavioral and the Social Sciences for the Military, National Research Council, U.S.A. 2006
* Elected Fellow, New York Academy of Medicine. 2004
* Vice President (Member Service), International Medical Informatics Association Governing Board. 2003-2006
* Outstanding Manuscript Award in Educational Methodology, Journal of Dental Education. 2002
* Member, Board of Directors, The Center for Decision Sciences ISERP, Columbia University, NY. 2001-2007
* Member, Bio-engineering Training and Education Program, National Science Foundation, USA. 1999-2007
* Chair, Editorial Committee, Medinfo2001, International Medical Informatics Association, London, UK. 1999
* D.Sc. (honorary), University of Victoria, BC, Canada. 1998
* Member, Roundtable on Work, Learning and Assessment, National Research Council, U.S.A. 1997
* Elected Member, Board of Governors, Cognitive Science Society. 1997
* Elected Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics. 1996
* Fellow, The Royal Society of Canada (elected by the Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences). 1996
* Elected “Woman of Science” for the year (Sweden). 1994

External links

* [http://www.fulton.asu.edu/~patel Vimla Patel's Homepage]
* [http://cognitive.asu.edu/research/index.php Dr.Patel's Research Projects]

Publications

* [http://www.fulton.asu.edu/~patel/journals.php Journal Articles]
* [http://www.fulton.asu.edu/~patel/chapters.php Book Chapters]
* [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?term=patel%20vl&cmd=search&db=pubmed Medline Publications]
* [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Vimla+L.Patel&hl=en&lr= Google Scholar Citations]

References