Meet…
25 August 2008
SLIS graduate Joshua Richardson Researches Medical Informatics as National Library of Medicine Fellow
Having received his MLIS from SLIS in 2001, Joshua Richardson is now doing innovative research with a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine. For three years Richardson has been attending Oregon Health & Science University's Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology located in Portland, Oregon. He anticipates obtaining his PhD degree in 2009 or 2010.
His focus is on biomedical informatics, which he describes as "a field of health care research that addresses how information technology (IT) can help patients and clinicians achieve better health care." Within this area, Richardson is studying how groups work together to collaborate and come to consensus, and how technology helps impact group decision-making.
Before being accepted into the PhD program Richardson received a master's degree in biomedical informatics. His master's thesis was a qualitative study on how nursing staff and IT staff perceived change when a new information and communication technology was implemented within a hospital-based setting. He discovered changes in team communication as well as differences in how nursing staff and IT staff perceived impacts brought about by the implementation of a new technology.
Richardson explains that biomedical informatics is an important area of research, with implications at the national, state and regional levels. President Bush has called for everyone in America to have an electronic health record by 2014. Towards this end, regional health and information organizations are beginning to form collaborations to collect and exchange patient data in the hopes of improving health care quality.
One of the classes that Richardson found most helpful at SLIS was Information Technology Tools and Applications. Learning HTML and XML was "a great introduction into the online world," and helped him learn to work in collaboration with IT teams in past jobs. He also credits the Online Reference course as giving him the experience and opportunity to work on a reference desk, where he was able to "witness first-hand how users seek information."
Richardson also notes that a management course with Dr. William Fisher helped teach him about change management, as well as the importance of setting up measurement tools and incentives. He recently bumped into Dr. Fisher at an Oregon SLA conference in Portland. Says Richardson, "It just shows how important it is to always remain in touch and stay connected with your colleagues in the profession."
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