Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant and HCIL Twinlist Team receive Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association Conference

Dr. Catherine Plaisant, Dr. Ben Shneiderman and their research team received a Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association Conference in Washington D.C. The award was given to only 5 full-length research papers out of the 330+ papers submitted to the conference. The award winning paper is entitled "Twinlist: Novel User Interface Designs for Medication Reconciliation."

Twinlist is an interface for medication reconciliation that alleviates the tediousness of manual reconciliation without diminishing a clinician's decision making ability. The award winning 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 lead to dramatic reductions in potentially life-threatening medication reconciliation errors. The project is also 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," says Dr. Shneiderman.

Learn More

• Read the paper
• View the Twinlist website