AMIA 09

Content: I was very fortunate to also be able to attend AMIA in San Fransisco.  There were many presentation and talks about a wide range of subjects in Biomedical Informatics.  I was most struck by the a presentation that Dr. Shotliffe gave when he was assessing the past, present and future of BMIE.  He basically gave the same presentation that he gave to us in the beginning of the semester in 501.  I thought it was incredible that we were able to hear this lecture before in a more private setting.

I tried to attend as many panel sessions as possible.  Topics in these panel sessions included, global health, BMI in the industry,  entreperneuship, and standards. One of the key note speakers was Mark D. Smith.  He is the CEO and president of the California Healthcare Foundation.  He have a really nice presentation about infomatics in his company.  He re-emphasis that he was struck by high levels of today's technology, yet the healthcare industry has not taken full advantage.  An example he gave was the fact that when nurse takes the patient's temperature with a digital termometer, and the nurse still has to write down the temperature either on paper, or in the computer.  Instead the thermoter should be connected to the computer and it should be automatically recorded.

The some panels were very interested and some needed a bit more structure.  The panel about global health was amazing, they talked about how biomedical informatics is being implemented in more poverty stricken countries.  The panel about Informatics roles in industry was lacking a bit, or I just had different expectations from it.  The panel was composed of people from industry and they just talked about their company and what the company was doing.  The description for the this panel mentioned that it was going to be about how to get into industry.  This is the first year AMIA had a panel like this one, maybe in the upcoming years, they will improve.  I also attented a panel on standards, yes standards.  The panel consisted of C. Chute from the Mayo Clinic.  I was told by various of my peers, especially Mithra, that he gave a lecture about standards in past years and he made it very exiting. I was a bit dissapointed on this panel too, because Chute only talked about BRIDG infastructure and not really about standards.  It was good expusure to BRIDG though, I can't complain too much.  I also went to a panel on enterprenuaship in BMI, again, I think I had different expectations about this panel, though it was nice to get a few names of upcoming companies in BMI. 

I also attended the student paper competition, which I thought was the best part of the whole conference, I really learned a lot from these presentations. I also attented most of the paper presentation from our department and I would like to congratulate Mithra for a great presentation!

Dr. Shortliffe mentioned this article in one of his presentations, I thought it might be interesting to read

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1883002,00.html


Posted by p. ortiz