Vimla Lodhia Patel is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist. Patel has worked in the area of biomedical informatics, in particular studying the mediating roles of technology on performance. Her work includes studies of medical errors and error reduction in emergency care and other critical medical environments, (including telephone triage). Her past work in health cognition includes studies of risk-taking behavior and sexual decision making as it pertains to HIV in youth and adolescents. Her current work focuses mostly on identifying underlying cognition in medical error and learning. Biography and career Patel was born in Fiji and obtained a degree in biochemistry and microbiology from University of Otago in New Zealand, and MA and PhD in Educational Psychology (Medical Cognition, 1980, 1981) from McGill University in Montreal, where she also served as professor of Medicine and Psychology and director of the Centre for Medical Education. She was a founding member of HEALnet (Health Evidence Application and Linkage Network), which made seminal contributions furthering informatics research and application in Canada. She was also a member of the InterMed Collaboratory, which developed guidelines for medical decision support, and has done extensive work in India, Africa, and Colombia in cross-cultural cognition research. In 2000 she became director of the Laboratory of Cognition and Decision Making in the department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, where she was also faculty in the department of Psychiatry and Teacher's College. From 2007 to 2009, she served as interim chair and vice chair of Department of BMI at Arizona State University. Patel was a professor of biomedical informatics and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Informatics and Decision Making at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston from 2009 to 2011. As of November 2011, Patel joined the New York Academy of Medicine as a senior research scientist and is the head of the Center for Cognitive Studies in Medicine and Public Health and is an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University in New York. Research In 1978 Elstein, Shulman and Sprafka applied cognitive science methods to investigate physicians’ clinical competence, developing a model of hypothetico-deductive reasoning which proposed that physicians reason by generating and testing a set of hypotheses to explain clinical data. This is an example of backward (hypothesis-to-data) reasoning. In 1986, Patel and Groen demonstrated that experts who accurately diagnosed complex clinical problems used forward reasoning (data to