Shneiderman, Plaisant win Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA Symposium

ISR-affiliated Professor Ben Shneiderman (CS/UMIACS) and HCIL Director of Research Catherine Plaisant (UMIACS), along with their research team, received a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2013 Annual Symposium.

The team won for their paper, "Twinlist: Novel User Interface Designs for Medication Reconciliation." The award was given to only five full-length research papers out of 330+ papers submitted to the conference.

Twinlist is an interface for medication reconciliation that alleviates the tediousness of manual reconciliation without diminishing a clinician's decision making ability. The paper described efforts to refine Twinlist, including staged animations and spatial layouts that enable users to perform medication reconciliation.

A recent study with 20 physicians showed that Twinlist led to dramatic reductions in potentially life-threatening medication reconciliation errors. The project also is gaining traction with commercial Electronic Health Record systems developers, who are now implementing their own versions of Twinlist.

"The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and many researchers [support] our innovative approach, and [have noted] that it is applicable to other medical situations. I am proud that these activities are [placing] UMD among the leaders in medical informatics research," Shneiderman says.