Researching Collective Mindfulness and Health IT: A Framework and Translation to Context-Specific Questions

To improve patient safety, hospital organisations are encouraged to run their operations in line with high reliability organisations’ collective mindfulness principles and practices. For the same safety goals, they also implement health information technology (IT). However, little is known about whether, or how, health IT can impact organisational mindfulness, and thereby safety. We propose that research in this area can be approached through a simple framework of overarching, umbrella questions, then carefully translated into nuanced context-specific questions and study designs. The framework and approach we propose provides a structure for comparing results from studies of collective mindfulness and health IT, across different clinical contexts and IT applications.