Biography
Dr. Joshua Vest is a health services researcher with an area of interest in the organizational determinants and effectiveness of health information technology and systems. Most of his work is focused on the adoption, utilization, and policy issues of technologies that facilitate the sharing of patient information between different organizations (referred to as health information exchange). His research on health information technology has appeared in Health Affairs, Health Care Management Review, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the International Journal of Medical Informatics, and others.
His 50+ peer-reviewed publications have employed a variety of research techniques from large scale database analyses, to geographical information system mapping, to survey research, to qualitative focus groups and interviews.
As a former local public health practitioner, Dr. Vest has a particular interest in effective public health information systems. He has peer-reviewed publications that examined the role of information technology governance structures on local public health departments' adoption of information technology and systems, the structure of state and local public health information systems, as well as an evaluation of email intervention to improve disease notification efforts.