Biography
Barbara Hewitt, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Health Informatics and Information Management (HIIM) at Texas State University. Her research focuses on sociotechnical systems in healthcare, with an emphasis on how people adopt, use and trust digital technologies, including AI-enabled tools. She holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration with a focus on Information Technology and a B.S. in Math, Computer Science and System Development from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and an MBA from Texas State University.
Dr. Hewitt teaches health information technology, information security, privacy, risk assessment and project management, mostly in online 8-week courses. She also supervises master's theses and serves as Graduate Clinical Coordinator for the MHIM program. Many of her thesis students go on to publish their work with her.
Before entering academia, Dr. Hewitt worked in industry as a software developer and systems analyst, including a stint as a user analyst at Southwest Texas State University. That experience shapes her interest in the behavioral, organizational and contextual factors behind technology use, such as health and digital literacy, privacy and security concerns, and perceptions of risk. Much of her work uses the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Threat Avoidance Theory and Protection Motivation Theory to explain what motivates people to protect their own computers and data, at home and in hybrid work environments. In healthcare, she studies how security, privacy, literacy and trust affect whether patients use telehealth, patient portals and AI-enabled tools. She has also studied ethical decision-making in healthcare, wearable devices, genetic testing decisions and technology use among people managing diabetes. Her ongoing work looks at how digital tools and digital maturity affect knowledge sharing among supply chain workers in hybrid settings. She uses mixed methods to understand how technology, people and organizations interact.
Dr. Hewitt pursues large, multi-institution funding. She served as PI on a $10 million proposal to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, leading a consortium of five Texas State University System institutions along with state, county and city health departments. She is Co-PI on STEM-CLEAR, a $2.6 million NSF initiative that creates learning pathways to help students in non-STEM majors build data and computing skills for their own fields. She also collaborated on ExpandAI, an NSF project that built AI curriculum and training infrastructure reaching over 900 learners across 17 departments at Texas State.
A nationally recognized advocate for women in computing, she founded San Antonio Women in Technology and is an active member of Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS). She coordinated the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing for the San Antonio region for more than a decade, and in 2018 she was named Woman of the Year by the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley.
Dr. Hewitt teaches health information technology, information security, privacy, risk assessment and project management, mostly in online 8-week courses. She also supervises master's theses and serves as Graduate Clinical Coordinator for the MHIM program. Many of her thesis students go on to publish their work with her.
Before entering academia, Dr. Hewitt worked in industry as a software developer and systems analyst, including a stint as a user analyst at Southwest Texas State University. That experience shapes her interest in the behavioral, organizational and contextual factors behind technology use, such as health and digital literacy, privacy and security concerns, and perceptions of risk. Much of her work uses the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Threat Avoidance Theory and Protection Motivation Theory to explain what motivates people to protect their own computers and data, at home and in hybrid work environments. In healthcare, she studies how security, privacy, literacy and trust affect whether patients use telehealth, patient portals and AI-enabled tools. She has also studied ethical decision-making in healthcare, wearable devices, genetic testing decisions and technology use among people managing diabetes. Her ongoing work looks at how digital tools and digital maturity affect knowledge sharing among supply chain workers in hybrid settings. She uses mixed methods to understand how technology, people and organizations interact.
Dr. Hewitt pursues large, multi-institution funding. She served as PI on a $10 million proposal to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, leading a consortium of five Texas State University System institutions along with state, county and city health departments. She is Co-PI on STEM-CLEAR, a $2.6 million NSF initiative that creates learning pathways to help students in non-STEM majors build data and computing skills for their own fields. She also collaborated on ExpandAI, an NSF project that built AI curriculum and training infrastructure reaching over 900 learners across 17 departments at Texas State.
A nationally recognized advocate for women in computing, she founded San Antonio Women in Technology and is an active member of Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS). She coordinated the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing for the San Antonio region for more than a decade, and in 2018 she was named Woman of the Year by the Women in IT Awards Silicon Valley.
Research Interests
My research applies sociotechnical systems theory to understand how people, technology, and organizational context interact to shape technology adoption, use, and trust. My primary focus is healthcare, where I study how privacy and security concerns, perceptions of risk, health and digital literacy, and trust affect whether patients use telehealth, patient portals, and AI-enabled tools. A closely related stream examines security behavior, drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Threat Avoidance Theory, and Protection Motivation Theory to explain why people do or do not protect their own computers and data at home and in hybrid work. I have also studied ethical decision-making in healthcare, including the ethical implications of AI, and health behaviors such as wearable device use, genetic testing decisions, and technology use among people managing diabetes. Building on my sociotechnical foundation, I am part of a theory-building effort with supply chain researchers. Drawing on the knowledge-based view and dynamic capabilities view, we introduced the distributed knowledge community, which explains how supply chain members share and build knowledge across distributed and hybrid work, supporting innovation and resilience. That collaboration has produced a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Information & Knowledge Management and a practitioner article in CSCMP's Supply Chain Quarterly, with a third paper in progress. I use mixed methods across this work, with the goal of informing the design of more equitable, usable, and trustworthy digital systems.
My grant work brings AI and health informatics into healthcare education. As Co-PI on the $2.6 million NSF STEM-CLEAR project led by Apan Qasem (Computer Science), I am developing modules that help students in STEM-adjacent healthcare disciplines succeed in our health informatics minor. On a recent NSF project, ExpandAI, led by Tahir Ekin (Information Systems and Analytics), I developed training modules on AI, both in general and specifically in healthcare, that reached over 900 learners across 17 departments at Texas State.
My grant work brings AI and health informatics into healthcare education. As Co-PI on the $2.6 million NSF STEM-CLEAR project led by Apan Qasem (Computer Science), I am developing modules that help students in STEM-adjacent healthcare disciplines succeed in our health informatics minor. On a recent NSF project, ExpandAI, led by Tahir Ekin (Information Systems and Analytics), I developed training modules on AI, both in general and specifically in healthcare, that reached over 900 learners across 17 departments at Texas State.
Teaching Interests
Computer Security
Project Management
Risk Assessment
Computers in healthcare
Project Management
Risk Assessment
Computers in healthcare