title: Why Johnny can't reengineer health care processes with information technology.
abstract: Many educational institutions are developing curricula that integrate computer and business knowledge and skills concerning a specific industry, such as banking or health care. We have developed a curriculum that emphasizes, equally, medical, computer, and business management concepts. Along the way we confronted a formidable obstacle, namely the domain specificity of the reference disciplines. Knowledge within each domain is sufficiently different from other domains that it reduces the leverage of building on preexisting knowledge and skills. We review this problem from the point of view of cognitive science (in particular, knowledge representation and machine learning) to suggest strategies for coping with incommensurate domain ontologies. These strategies include reflective judgment, implicit learning, abstraction, generalization, analogy, multiple inheritance, project-orientation, selectivity, goal- and failure-driven learning, and case- and story-based learning.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Information Sciences, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282, USA.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Webster
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: McLinden
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Begler
mesh_terms: D003132:Commerce / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003479:Curriculum; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D004493:Education / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006285:Health Planning / Q000379:methods; D007600:Judgment; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010414:Pennsylvania; D018794:Problem-Based Learning; D018511:Systems Integration