Applied AI and Emerging Technologies
The division leads the department’s work on artificial intelligence in emergency care, from ambient documentation tools that draft notes during a patient encounter to large language models that summarize long patient records.
Our goal is not to convince clinicians to trust AI but to build effective human-AI teams, with clear roles, safeguards, ways to give feedback, and accountability. Division faculty help lead clinical AI governance at UW Health, which means AI tools reaching our emergency departments have been reviewed for safety, fit for purpose, and ongoing monitoring before they arrive. Lead: Brian Patterson, MD, MPH
Clinical Decision Support and EHR Workflow
Decision support only helps if it fits the way clinicians actually work. The division designs, implements, evaluates, and maintains decision support for the emergency department, and studies the burden the electronic record places on the people using it. Our faculty have published on the growth of the electronic note and the time cost of chart review in emergency care, and that work informs how we build.
Prehospital and EMS Informatics 
Emergency care begins before a patient reaches the hospital, yet prehospital data are often difficult to access, connect, and use. The division works broadly to improve how EMS data are integrated and applied to support continuity of care, quality improvement, operational decision-making, and collaborative research. Lead: Michael Spigner, MD, NRP
Human Factors and Implementation Science
The success or failure of a digital tool usually comes down to the gap between how the work is imagined and how the work is actually performed. The division includes doctoral-level human factors expertise and uses systems engineering methods to study clinician workflow, usability, and the organizational conditions that determine whether a tool is adopted, ignored, or worked around. Lead: Hanna Barton, PhD
Analytics and Emergency Department Operations
The division partners with department and health system operational leaders to turn data into decisions about crowding, throughput, staffing, and quality, while ensuring the numbers are interpreted with the operational context behind them.
Education and Faculty Development
The division builds informatics and AI fluency across the department for residents, advanced practice providers, faculty, and staff. We integrate informatics and AI content into residency and faculty development curricula, offer workshops and just-in-time education as new tools arrive in the clinical environment, and support resident and fellow scholarly projects in informatics.
Faculty and trainees interested in an informatics career have access to mentorship, sponsorship for institutional committees and leadership roles, and support in building a scholarly portfolio that reflects both operational and academic contributions.
On this page
Featured Projects
Preventing falls after an emergency department visit
Older adults discharged from the emergency department are at high risk of a subsequent fall, and the visit is a missed opportunity to intervene and reduce future injury. With support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, division faculty developed a machine learning tool that identifies high-risk older adults at the point of discharge and connects them to falls prevention resources, and are testing it in a pragmatic clinical trial.
Ambient documentation in the emergency department
Documentation is one of the largest sources of clinician burden in emergency care. UW Health has deployed ambient AI documentation, which listens to the clinical conversation and drafts the note, at scale across the health system. Division faculty helped lead the evaluation, governance, and monitoring of this technology and continue to study its effect on documentation burden, note quality, and clinician experience.
EMS-Hospital Health Information Exchange
We created a bidirectional health information exchange that links EMS and hospital records across the emergency care continuum. The system improves record matching and interoperability across Dane County, gives EMS agencies greater insight into downstream patient outcomes, and supports clinical decision-making, predictive modeling, and outcomes-based analysis.
This project is led by Dr. Michael Spigner, one of the few physicians in the United States with board certification in both EMS and clinical informatics.
