About
I am an Associate Professor of Health Informatics in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University, where I also lead development for my college’s initiatives at the ASU California Center in Downtown Los Angeles, CA. My interdisciplinary work lies at the intersection of health informatics, human-computer interaction (HCI), information systems, management, and public health. I draw on and contribute to these fields to research information technologies for health care delivery in different contexts. Specifically, I study data-driven practices and information technologies and how the design of technologies, the contexts of technology use, and the ways that people use technologies impact how people give and receive healthcare in hospital, prehospital, outpatient, and community health care settings. I personally utilize primarily qualitative methods, and frequently work in teams with other researchers to carry out mixed-methods research (i.e. combining qualitative, quantitative, design, and implementation approaches). My collaborators, students, and I translate our research into practice through working directly with community and clinical partners. Much of my work at present centers on data practices, the situated social, technical, and organizational practices through which data are created, managed, and deployed. I have three main streams of research:
Understanding the present and designing the future of 911 response and emergency medical services
911 call volume for calls answered by fire departments rose over 30% in the U.S. between 2013 and 2017 alone—much of the increase can be attributed to calls for medical aid. This research examines questions including: What is the impact of rising call volume on firefighters and fire departments? How are fire departments adapting their mission and operations to address rising 911 call volume? How are data-driven technologies currently being deployed to identify and address community risks, thus reducing 911 call volume? How can we design, build, and evaluate prototypes for the future of “EMS prevention” in fire departments using human-centered approaches that avoid potential pitfalls of data-driven tools observed in other sectors?
Before the algorithm: crafting data in the ‘data-driven’ hospital
Health care organizations across the world face an imperative to become data-driven, and demonstrating collection and use of data is increasingly seen as a hallmark of being a high-quality health care organization. This research addresses questions including: How are health care organizations re-organizing to become ‘data-driven’, and what are the consequences for healthcare practice and workers? What are the situated work practices involved in producing data to fuel data-driven forms of management and accountability? How could health care work systems be designed to make visible and support data work?
The patient labor of accessing healthcare and receiving treatment
Many patients, particularly those with multiple chronic healthcare conditions and negative social determinants of health, face enormous obstacles in accessing healthcare, carrying out medical treatment, and maintaining other necessary activities alongside the demands of patient work. As part of the Patient Work Translational Team, my colleagues and I address questions including: What is the work that patients do to receive treatment within a fragmented landscape of service providers? What interventions could be designed to better support patient work and relieve the burden of treatment? This stream of research also examines how individuals conduct informal risk work to assess and manage risks during public health crises such as the Zika virus epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic.
My research has been published in top venues including Academy of Management Journal, Big Data & Society, Social Science & Medicine, Health Informatics Journal, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM CHI), and ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (ACM CSCW). This work has been supported by grants from agencies and foundations including the National Science Foundation, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
I received a Ph.D. in Social Ecology with a concentration in Environmental Analysis and Design from the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology under the guidance of doctoral advisor Martha Feldman. Before working at ASU, I worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Informatics at UCI with Melissa Mazmanian and Paul Dourish and as a Postdoctoral Research Engineer in the User Experience Research (UXR) group at Intel Labs under the guidance of Ken Anderson, Mel Gregg, and Mic Bowman. In addition to my appointments in the ASU College of Health Solutions, I am am affiliate faculty in ASU’s Design School and College of Global Futures as well as a Research Collaborator with the Mayo Clinic Knowledge and Evaluation Research Unit.
I teach multiple courses on topics related to human-centered computing, healthcare management, and research methods. A list of publications (along with links to some of my papers) is available here. Please email me directly for copies of articles not available on this site. My Google Scholar page is the most up-to-date source for my academic writing.
Contact Information
Email: khpine (at) asu.edu
Mailing address:
1111 S. Broadway
Suite 100
Los Angeles, CA 90015
Office Hours:
by appointment