Vimla Lodhia Patel FRSC is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist.
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.
Patel was born in Fiji and was educated at Southland Girls High School and the University of Otago in New Zealand.
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 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.