Joy A. Rivera PhD

Joy A. Rivera, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of Patient Safety & Patient Relations at Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, WI. She obtained her BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the mentorship of the late Dr. Ben-Tzion Karsh. Dr. Rivera’s expertise is in human factors engineering and socio-technical systems theory as applied to the domain of healthcare to improve the quality of care and increase patient and employee safety. Her specific interests from both an operational and research perspective lie in understanding how healthcare professionals interact with one another to communicate, make decisions, work as teams, problem-solve, and recover from system failures such as poorly designed technology. In particular, Dr. Rivera’s research on the way healthcare providers communicate with one another via interruptions (either face-to-face or mediated through technology) has provided a unique framing of the problem space and new directions for interruption researchers to design interventions that are more compatible with healthcare delivery workflows. At CHW, with her team, Dr. Rivera provides strategic and integrative consultation services to large system projects, provides tactical guidance on technology purchasing, implementation, and acceptance of use, teaches human factors and systems engineering principles and methods to medical faculty, residents, fellows, nurses, management, etc., leads Proactive Risk Assessments, conducts research, and collaborates with information technology vendors to improve the usability of their systems.