Cognitive informatics: An essential component of nursing technology design

The implementation of various information technology (IT) systems designed to support, enhance and even transform healthcare delivery is inevitable. What is less certain, however, is whether or not these systems will be utilized to their greatest capacity and whether nurses will appreciate how IT systems can contribute to the knowledge base of nursing and to clinical practice. One might wonder why this seemingly counterintuitive discrepancy over information system usage and appreciation exists. The answer may very well lay behind the scenes in the infrastructure of the IT system and its user interfaces, especially in how closely the functions of the system resemble human cognition and practice patterns of the nurses utilizing them. A relatively new addition to the informatics foundations family, cognitive informatics (CI), will provide useful insights into how and why IT is embraced or resisted. In this column, we will provide an overview of cognitive informatics and the potential contributions of this emerging field to the design of effective clinical IT systems.