Velma Payne, PhD, MBA, MS

Assistant Professor and Program Director, Health Informatics

Research Interests

Rural Health & Health Information Technology – Assessment of the current state and value of Health Information Technology in rural healthcare settings to determine ways HIT can be used to enhance clinical care in underserved populations.
Diagnostic Errors - Diagnostic errors and improving the diagnostic process by studying aspects of diagnosis from the provider and patient perspective, including cognitive aspects of physicians’ diagnostic reasoning including the impact of cognitive heuristics and biases on diagnostic decision-making and the use of feedback and metacognition interventions to enhance diagnostic reasoning.
Patient Experience & Engagement - The patient experience and patient engagement in the diagnostic process, identifying factors that foster or thwart patient involvement and the impact of patient involvement on clinical outcomes.

Sample Publications

Payne, VL, Hysong, SJ (2016). Model Depicting Aspects of Audit and Feedback that Impact Physicians’ Acceptance of Clinical Performance Feedback. BMC Health Services Research. 16:260

Payne, VL, Singh, H, Meyer AND, Levy, L, Harrison, D, Graber, ML (2014). Patient-Initiated Second Opinions: Systematic Review of Characteristics and Impact on Diagnosis, Treatment, and Satisfaction. Mayo Clinic Proc, May 2014;89(5):687-696

Payne, VL, Crowley, RS (2008). Assessing the use of the cognitive heuristic Representativeness in clinical reasoning. AMIA Annu Symp Proc, Nov 6, 2008;571-5. PMID 18999140; PMCID 2656076

Bio

Dr. Payne is the Program Director of Health Informatics. Her research focuses on using technology to enhance patient care, technology-based tools to enhance the patient experience and engagement, reducing disparities of care in rural settings, diagnostic errors, use of feedback and metacognition to enhance clinical reasoning, cognitive aspects of medical decision-making and the impact of cognitive heuristics and biases on diagnosis.

She served as an invited expert speaker at numerous international conferences including the following:

Improving Diagnoses Through Cognitive Debiasing, PIAA International Conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
How to Reduce Chances of Misdiagnosis, and Deep Root Cause Analysis: Patient and Professional Dialog on Diagnostic Errors, Diagnostic Error in Medicine International Conference, Atlanta, Georgia

Dr. Payne holds a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in Biomedical Informatics. A lifelong learner, she also holds an MBA from Robert Morris College, as well as two Master of Science degrees—one in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh and the second in Computer Information Systems from Robert Morris College.