Posts Tagged ‘Medical Informatics’

American Association of Medical Colleges – Group on Information Resources

July 22, 2010

Next week I am attending a leadership institute of the AAMC in La Jolla, California. This week-long institute is by nomination – a group of 33 of us will attend, many CIOs and other leaders in healthcare IT and library science at academic medical centers. The program is very participatory with small groups making up much of the time as well as some lectures from a diverse faculty. Doing preparation for the institute has provoked thinking about leadership concepts and how to influence change in academic organizations. Although the term innovation is not explicit in the program, it certainly is on my mind as I prepare. One of the readings in preparation is from the book, Medicine and Business: Bridging the Gap by Sheldon Rovin, particularly chapter 3 on Leading Change. Also recommended to me are:

I have to give credit to all those supporting my attendance and interested in the outcome. There is the potential for a major impact on my career and outlook. Looking beyond managing programmers and supporting research projects, there are opportunities to influence the future of medicine. I want to be a part of that.

Informatics as the glue between the I.T. enterprise and the clinical leadership

April 12, 2009

In an article from the NY Times today, medical informatics is described as “Connecting the Dots of Medicine and Data.” The article points out some example of roles filled by medical informatics and also the lack of standards for educational programs in medical informatics many of which are masters degrees or certificate programs. At the same time, the chief executive of AMIA cites the need for 70,000 health informaticians as the government provides incentives for electronic medical records. This quote summarizes the profession well:

“IT takes more than technical skills and an understanding of health care to succeed as a health informatician. Diplomacy skills are crucial in connecting two potentially contentious groups: doctors and programmers.”

NIH Biomedical Research on Google Tech Talk

January 21, 2008

Posted on YouTube there is a presentation by Michael Marron, Ph.D. of the NIH Division of Biomedical Technology discussing NIH support for informatics research. He specifically notes cloud computing as a key area of interested. He outlines the strategy for making investments. Topics include: computational evolutionary biology, prediction of protein structure, metagenomics, etc. The video is about 45 minutes. Fascinating to see the latest fields in which high capacity computing is being used in medical research. He notes that today new science is data-centric science – a data tsunami.

Note: embedding is disabled for this video

American Medical Informatics Association Meeting In Chicago

November 13, 2007

Only there in spirit, I found some interesting abstracts and hope to hear more about the presentations. One is a panel on “ Unintended Consequences of Health Informatics Innovations” which includes: PHRs place unrealistic expectations on patients, sharing of EHR information from different providers may threaten patient safety if the information conflicts, social networking may be “discouraging and increase self-medication”. and home monitoring may “may also change the home from a private to public space.”

Also, there is a section of the poster session devoted to Consumer Informatics and PHRs. And a late breaking session on Microsoft HealthVault.

AMIA Podcasts

September 2, 2007

The American Medical Informatics Association has a growing selection of podcasts based, some of which are free, on a variety of informatics topics and conference presentations. The Pharmacy Informatics working group has monthly podcasts, others are less frequent but there are worthwhile ones on patient empowerment and personalize medicine. The podcasts are MP3 format and have RSS subscription and iTunes listing.

The Patient Empowerment podcast includes Gunther Eysenbach.