Health is one of the most rapidly growing areas of research in the iSchool movement because of its social importance, the significant role of information and information technology in health care, and the intertwined social, organizational, medical, and technical issues associated with solving health care problems. With the aging population and the epidemic of obesity in the United States, there is rapidly increasing attention on health issues. Approximately one third of the faculty in the UT iSchool are working on issues of health information or health informatics. A number of our faculty members are working on a single disease, diabetes, which is the most prevalent and costly chronic illness in America. While the focus of much of the faculty's research on health targets the United States, many of these projects have obvious applications to health issues in other countries. Here is a survey of the work being carried out in the UT School of Information, as of fall 2009, on health information and health informatics.

Gary Geisler

Gary Geisler is working with colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital on a National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine funded grant project called eMicrobes: A Digital Library for Learning Infectious Diseases. The three-year project will develop eMicrobes to be an extensive and easily searchable digital library of interactive case studies and images that will enable medical students, practicing physicians, and other healthcare workers to more easily learn and find information about infectious diseases. Important goals of the project include dynamically integrating relevant information from on-line biomedical sources such as PubMed to enrich case information; to provide options to store and access eMicrobes resources locally when not connected to the Internet, such as in rural settings and resource-scarce countries; and to support access from mobile devices.

Luis Francisco-Revilla

Luis Francisco-Revilla's work in health informatics has focused on studying how new technological platforms and novel visualization methods can help improve the health of target populations. In particular, he works on studying and devising socio-technical solutions that help in discovering temporal and geo-spatial relationships between health aspects and environmental factors, and in understanding the effect of specific policies on health aspects. As a member of the Technical Advisory Committee Luis Francisco-Revilla has been collaborating with Children's Optimal Health to "visual images to inform policy, improve operations, promote research, and mobilize the community to better the lives of our children and youth". Francisco-Revilla has collaborated with Sandia National Laboratories in the development of a diabetes model and simulator aimed at informing health policy makers about the possible effects of alternative policies. This collaboration also studies how to use these technologies as an intervention mechanism for helping high-risk populations prevent the development of diabetes.

Yan Zhang

Yan Zhang's research on health information focuses on people's general health information needs, health information searching behavior in the web environment, and the usability of web-based consumer health information systems. In the past, she has worked on a personal health records (PHRs) project, exploring people's needs and concerns of digital PHRs and the effects of different information presentation formats on people's perceptions of their health conditions. She has worked with an industry partner on improving the usability of their web-based service providing individualized recommendations for vitamin, supplements, and shopping guidelines for customers. She has also worked on a project investigating how people judge relationships between medical concepts and whether such end user judgments can improve the performance of a medical concept extraction and association program. In her doctoral dissertation, she explored the change and development of people's mental representations of MedlinePlus, a consumer health website created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine, during a search session. Continuing on this line of research, she is currently looking at the relationship between subjects' mental representations and their information searching behavior in MedlinePlus. Meanwhile she is working on a project to identify the characteristics of people's health information needs as manifested by the questions that they submit to social questions and answers websites and how consumer health information systems can be designed to better support such needs.

William Aspray

William Aspray's work in health informatics has focused on sociotechnical aspects of chronic disease. Together with Barbara Hayes of Indiana University, he is editing Health Informatics: A Patient-Centered Approach to Diabetes (MIT Press, to appear 2010). He has written for this volume, also with Hayes, a long essay on "The Informatics of Diabetes: A Research Agenda for the Socially and Institutionally Sensitive Use of Information Technology to Improve Healthcare." The book includes articles by faculty at a number of the iSchools (Florida State, Georgia Tech, Indiana, Michigan, Northeastern, Texas, and Washington) and covers such topics as ubiquitous computing, avatars as health coaches, serious gaming, and electronic health records.

Glynn Harmon

Glynn Harmon's past health information/informatics research has focused on the areas of providing cost-effective telemedicine consultation for diabetic and other patients; the role of the clinical medical librarian--now emerging as the informationist, who provides evidence-based instruction and consultation for both clinical providers and consumers; the emergence of public health informatics; and unconscious cognition in the genesis of reference queries.

His current research involves exploration of Nobel laureate discovery patterns in physiology and medicine and the potential acceleration of discovery therein; the comparative performance of evidence-based medicine aggregator capabilities of different search engines--specifically SUMSearch, PubMed and Google Scholar--as a joint effort with Robert Badgett, professor of internal medicine and chief of medical informatics at UTHSCSA and inventor of SUMSearch; and discovery patterns in bio-gerontology, possibly in collaboration with the Barshop Center for Biogerontology at UTHSCSA.

Bill Lukenbill and Barbara Immroth

Bill Lukenbill and Barbara Immroth are collaborating on research and publications that address the health needs of youth. Lukenbill's interest in health related topics extends to his research resulting in several published works on HIV-AIDS including AIDS-HIV Information Services and Programs in Libraries (Englewood, Colorado: Libraries Unlimited, 1994). Lukenbill and Immroth's current research and published works include the book Health Information for Youth: The Public Library and School Library Media Center Role (Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2007) and the forthcoming book Health Education Across the Curriculum (Libraries Unlimited, 2010).

In 2006-2007 Immroth and Lukenbill received a School of Information Teaching Fellowship for a research project "Public and School Librarians as Health Information Gatekeepers for Youth in Small Towns and Rural Areas in South Texas", which funded a Delphi study of those librarians, resulting in the paper "School and Public Youth Librarians as Health Information Gatekeepers: Research from the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas," in School Library Media Research (2009). Immroth presented a paper written with Lukenbill "The Rio Grande Valley of Texas: Issues and Models for Health Information for Youth" at the 73rd IFLA General Conference and Council, Durban, South Africa, August 26, 2007. At the 2009 75th IFLA Conference in Milan, Italy, they presented Get HIP: Providing Health Care Information for Youth through Collaboration and Team-Building. They also presented a paper on health information in the school curriculum at the International Association of School Librarians, Padua, Italy, August 2009. (available in the published proceedings of IASL)

In recent years they have been collaborating with the Outreach Office of the Library, University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio in developing conferences in order to educate school librarians to work with teachers, nurses, counselors and other school personnel to better meet the goals of "Coordinated School Health Program (CSHP)" established by the Centers for Disease Control, designed to encourage schools to become more involved in improving the health of youth in school. The first conference based on the CDC model was presented in San Antonio, Texas on June 3, 2008. A similar conference is being planned for April 2010. Plans are to continue such presentations at local levels throughout the state and nation.

Loriene Roy

Loriene Roy entered the field of librarianship from a previous career as a board certified Medical Radiologic Technologist. More recently, she launched a Workplace Wellness initiative during her service as the 2007-2008 President of the American Library Association. This initiative included a survey sponsored by the ALA-APA, providing benchmark figures for the status of Wellness support in public, academic, school, and special libraries. 88.8 percent of the 2,147 respondents indicated that their work environments supported some wellness initiative such as employee assistance plans, flu shots, or wellness classes. In addition to workplace wellness, writes about indigenous lifeways, including Native language recovery, cultural heritage initiatives, and the impact of technology on indigenous communities.