Dear Colleague, We invite you to participate in "IT in Health Care: Socio-technical Approaches, Second International Conference," September 13-14, 2004, in Portland, Oregon. Details of the conference and abstract submission process are now available on the conference website: http://www.ohsu.edu/dmice/ithc2004. Please share this message with anyone who you think may be interested; our apologies if you receive multiple copies. Paul Gorman and Jos Aarts, Co-Chairs for the ITHC 2004 Organizing Committee gormanp@ohsu.edu j.aarts@bmg.eur.nl ====Call for Participation We invite you to participate in "IT in Health Care: Socio-technical Approaches, Second International Conference," September 13-14, 2004, in Portland, Oregon. Building on the successes of the first ITHC conference in Rotterdam in September, 2001, ITHC 2004 will again focus on the complex interaction of the social and technical aspects of information system design, implementation, and evolution in health care. The conference is hosted by the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health & Science University, and takes place immediately following MEDINFO 2004. The aim of the conference is to bring together investigators from diverse fields concerned with the interaction and interdependence of information technologies and the social and work contexts within which they are deployed. The conference will be of modest size to promote informal interchange among participants, in addition to the plenary speakers and formal paper presentations that are scheduled. Selected papers from the conference are to be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Medical Informatics. The first ITHC conference in Rotterdam focused on 'sociotechnical' approaches: "approaches that consider 'social' and 'technical' aspects as inextricably intertwined, and as equally important in information systems design, implementation and evaluation." In the second we hope to extend this theme with a focus on the system, and how safety, among other things, is an emergent property of the system as a whole. The conference theme "To Err is System" is thus intended to reflect three differing perspectives: 1. The pervasive view that technological failures are due to technological system issues - "if, only we had had the latest version, higher bandwidth, a better system" 2. The socio-technical perception that health informatics is fraught with difficulties due to a lack of awareness and understanding of the socio-cultural environment in which such applications are implemented; 3. The systems view that health care is produced through interaction of the people, technologies, and processes of care, and that changes in one of these elements produce further, sometimes unexpected, changes in the other elements or in their interactions. Key Dates Deadline for submission abstracts 16 February 2004 Notification of acceptance 12 April 2004 Deadline for final papers 2 August 2004 More information at http://www.ohsu.edu/dmice/ithc2004.