Sociotechnical Ethnography in Health Informatics: Bridging Technology, Practice, and Human Experience at PSB 2027

As AI and digital health technologies become increasingly embedded in clinical practice, understanding how they perform in real-world social and organizational contexts has never been more important. This session brings together researchers working at the intersection of computational methods, ethnographic inquiry, and clinical care.

We are particularly excited to announce the launch of the Observer Consortium, a federated network of scientists and multimodal clinical datasets from partner institutions across the United States and beyond. Built on the success of the Observer Repository (https://observer.med.upenn.edu/), a dataset of video-recorded clinical visits with synchronized audio, transcripts, and linked EHR data, the Consortium represents a major new infrastructure for collaborative, multimodal health research. This session will serve as its public launch.

We welcome submissions on topics including:

· Computational methods (NLP, ML, AI, computer vision) using multimodal clinical data

· Ethnographic or observational studies of EHR, clinical decision support, or AI systems

· Patient-provider communication, health equity, and clinical conversation analysis

· Methodological innovations combining computational and ethnographic approaches

· Frameworks for responsible sharing and governance of multimodal clinical data

· Privacy-preserving approaches to multimodal data sharing

Papers are rigorously peer reviewed and published in PSB's archival proceedings (https://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/). Full submission details and formatting guidelines are available at: https://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/psb-submit/

Important Dates:

· Paper submissions due: August 3, 2026

· Notification of acceptance: September 8, 2026

· Camera-ready deadline: October 1, 2026

· Abstract/Poster submissions due: December 1, 2026

We encourage you to begin preparing submissions early, as no extensions can be granted.