Dr. Patterson’s research on bar code medication administration and clinical reminders was identified by the Association for Healthcare Research and Quality, the VA, and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society as seminal in identifying negative unintended consequences associated with the implementation of health information technology. She was a co-author on the national standard for the summative usability testing methodology for ensuring the safety of electronic health records published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as published in NISTIR 7804 and 7804-1. On a project for which she recently served as Principal Investigator funded by the Association of Healthcare Research and Quality, a redesign of the tones and escalation strategies reduced time to respond to Code Blue events in the Wexner medical center for continuous cardiac and respiratory monitoring. These alerts are received by nurses on hospital-provided mobile devices on telemetry units.

Her direction is to improve the usefulness, workflow, efficiency, usability, and accuracy of clinical documentation in electronic health records by care providers in hospitals and outpatient clinics. These improvements are achieved by applying human factors methodologies such as workflow analysis, cognitive task analysis, and usability evaluations. In addition, she is interested in incorporating machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and mixed reality to enhance naturalistic decision making.