Jennifer Claggett
Improving Outcomes

As an associate professor of management information systems, Jennifer Claggett is firmly rooted in the Wake Forest University School of Business, where she studies “how we can use technology to improve organizational outcomes.” 

“But the majority of my research is specifically in health care settings, looking at how we can use technology to improve health outcomes,” Claggett says. “Health care has so much potential impact and is complex. If you can figure out an issue in healthcare, many times you can implement something similar in other industries.”

Claggett is an AT&T Faculty Fellow at the School of Business while also serving as an associate at the Biomedical Informatics Center and a Champion Member at the Center for Healthcare Innovation as part of the Wake Forest School of Medicine. “To have two great professional schools really enables a lot of my research. It’s been a wonderful fit,” says Claggett, who joined the School of Business faculty in 2020. 

As a behavioral researcher, Claggett studies how people and organizations adopt, resist, and use technology. Her work bridges psychology, management, and information systems to design and optimize tools that enhance decision-making and patient care. She explains, “my goal is not just to study technology but to shape it—ensuring that it empowers rather than overwhelms, and that it complements human strengths while addressing real-world challenges.”

Increasingly, her research is delving into artificial intelligence. 

“Tools rooted in AI can create highly customized solutions, perhaps providing more customized medical advice, but there comes with it risks of biases and data blind spots,” she says. 

Claggett explains, “How do we take a sea of data available to new technologies, say 30 years of electronic health records, and use technology to parse it, interpret it and insert it efficiently into the decision-making process? We’re having an explosion of tools that use machine learning, and we can build them quickly, but how should we build them and how should we use them meaningfully in health care?”

A team that Claggett works with at the medical school created an algorithmic frailty score for older patients that can, for example, help a surgical team determine if a person is a good candidate for knee surgery. “But there are still some important ‘human’ questions around that,” Claggett says. “How do you communicate a frailty score to a patient? How and when do you use these scores? What do clinicians and hospitals need to understand as far as data biases?” 

Another research stream focuses on remote patient monitoring projects. For instance, there are technologies that record and transmit frequent blood pressure readings from a person’s home, rather than taking them annually at a doctor’s office.

“More readings — more data — are usually better than a single reading, and a lot of these projects have good medical outcomes, allowing clinicians to fine-tune medications and better regulate blood pressure,” Claggett says. “But the programs tend to fizzle, often when the funding runs out for a pilot. So, we’re trying to figure out how to make them more sustainable. It’s not just about making a better tool that gives clinicians more data; it’s about making the tool efficient so clinicians can trust it and weave it into their process flow without it costing them any additional time.” 

Claggett believes deeply that “health care is so important because we can’t enjoy any of life’s riches without good health.” And that makes seeing clinicians rely on her research particularly satisfying.

Case in point: Claggett examined how an average person assesses the credibility and quality of medical information they find on the internet, and the findings have been published in both business and medical journals.

“I recently had a clinician from The Center for Innovative GYN Care in Rockville, Maryland, contact me,” Claggett recalls. “She was in the process of building an online resource for women in that area to educate them, answer their questions and help them understand their resources. She said, ‘This is my understanding of your papers. How do I apply it to my context? What are the nuances I might be missing?’ It’s always lovely to hear from people who’ve read your papers and know that the research has impacted them.”