Health Imagination and Communication Lab (HICL)

The Health Imagination & Communication Lab investigates how digital technologies, including patient portals, telehealth, electronic health records, wearables, and AI-based tools, are reshaping communication between patients, clinicians, and support staff, and what that means for the quality and reach of care. The lab takes its name from a central observation in its work: that what patients, clinicians, and staff are able to envision technology doing in healthcare is itself shaped by social, organizational, and structural conditions, with real consequences for how care is delivered.

Combining quantitative, qualitative, computational, and participatory methods, the lab examines how digital health tools are used, imagined, designed, and governed in everyday clinical and community settings. Active projects examine how patients, clinicians, and support staff use and envision digital health technologies in primary care, and what that means for communication and care; how language disparities in search engines, chatbots, and AI systems shape access to health information; and how participatory and co-design approaches can make digital tools more responsive to the people they are meant to serve.

The lab's research is grounded in partnerships with primary care sites and community organizations across New Jersey. It collaborates closely with colleagues at Rutgers' School of Health Professions, School of Public Health, and with researchers and community partners in the U.S. and Europe.