Page 122 - Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication: Putting the Consumer First: Workshop Summary

APPenDiX C 0

ing information technology/communication research and development
projects in public health and in the private health care sector. She has
extensive experience architecting, designing, developing, and evaluat-
ing information systems for consumers and health professionals. She is
the editor of Health and the new Media: technologies transforming Personal
and Public Health. Her Ph.D. is in communication from the University of
Massachusetts.

Rita kukafka, Dr.P.H., M.A., is jointly appointed with the Department of
Biomedical Informatics and the Mailman School of Pubic Health (Socio-
medical Sciences). She holds a doctorate degree from the School of Public
Health at Columbia University and two master’s degrees, one in health
education, and the second in biomedical informatics from Columbia Uni-
versity, where she also completed a National Library of Medicine awarded
postdoctoral fellowship in medical informatics.
Dr. Kukafka maintains an active, funded program of research and
publication in public health informatics while being engaged in major
leadership roles in the field. Her research is at the crossroads of bio-
medical informatics and public health including computer interventions
for chronic disease self-management, health promotion and informed
decision-making, patient focused electronic health records and personal
health records, tailoring health communication, and interactive computer
graphics for communicating health risk probabilities to patients. Another
area of her research focuses on how theory from the behavioral sciences
can be applied to advance our understanding and to improve our capacity
to implement information technology systems into health care organiza-
tions. She is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association
Board of Directors and she is a past chair of that organization’s Working
Group on Consumer Health Informatics. She is on the editorial board of
the Journal of Biomedical informatics, and serves on the editorial boards
for several other biomedical informatics publications. Dr. Kukafka has
authored several key articles and books, and book chapters in the fields
of public health informatics and consumer health informatics.
Dr. Kukafka is an experienced mentor; notably in the area of public
health informatics where she spearheaded the formation of the public
health informatics program at the Department of Biomedical Informatics,
Columbia University, one of four programs in the country, to build this
specialization with training support from the Robert Wood Foundation
and National Library of Medicine.

Janet M. Marchibroda, M.b.A., is the chief executive officer of the
eHealth Initiative and its Foundation, both Washington, DC-based inde-
pendent, national nonprofit organizations whose missions are to improve

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