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G. Fitzpatrick:
"The challenge of designing eHealth technologies that work in everyday practice";
Keynote Lecture: CBMS 2016, Belfast, Northern Ireland (invited); 2016-06-20 - 2016-06-23.

Many of us share a passionate belief in the power and potential of technology to transform healthcare delivery and to meet the challenges of rising costs and an aging population. It is because of this potential that conferences such as CBMS exist, to push the boundaries of science and technology research to realise `computational medicine´. It is because of this potential that many national governments have set out national health IT/eHealth programs, going back to the 1990s and early 2000s. However, in the excitement about the `computational´ part, we can inadvertently forget about the `medicine´ part or, as I will characterise it here, the everyday lived realities of delivering health care in practice and how technical solutions fit into and shape this practice. A good technical system is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for good computational medicine. In this presentation, I will re-visit some of the early visions around `computational medicine´, particularly for electronic health records, and use examples from studies to show how the reality of technology use in practice can be quite different. These point to the complexity of healthcare practice and the challenges for both design and evaluation: how to conceptualise and design the right sort of technology; and how to enable and evaluate the process of appropriation and integration of technology into evolving practices over time, while also needing to evaluate outcomes.