Beyond Medical Informatics

3rd SEMINAR ON HEALTH INFORMATICS — UPM-NThC

College of Dentistry Auditorium, University of the Philippines Manila Pedro Gil St. Cor. Taft Avenue, Manila June 26 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM.

Coming from the widely successful first (April and second (May 21) Seminars on Health Informatics, the UP Manila National Telehealth Center is inviting more health and IT professionals and students to participate in the third offering at the UP College of Dentistry Auditorium on June 26th, 2010.

This third seminar aims to offer the same content as the first but with additional talks by professionals working in health IT. It also promises to provide participants with concrete action items that they can pursue to further sharpen their knowledge and skills in health informatics.

WHAT: 2nd SEMINAR ON HEALTH INFORMATICS
WHERE: College of Dentistry Auditorium, UP Manila, Pedro Gil St. Cor. Taft Avenue, Manila
WHEN: 21 May 2010 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Coming from the widely successful first Seminar on Health Informatics last April 8, the UP Manila National Telehealth Center is inviting more health and IT professionals and students to participate in the second offering at the UP College of Dentistry Auditorium on May 21st, 2010.

This second seminar aims to offer the same content as the first but with additional talks by professionals working in health IT. It also promises to provide participants with concrete action items that they can pursue to further sharpen their knowledge and skills in health informatics.

More information here.

I got this through the Philippine Medical Informatics Society (PMIS) mailing list—a new online Wikibook entitled ‘Handbook of Biomedical Informatics’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Biomedicalnformatics

The sender was Instituto Edumed. Here’s an excerpt of the email.:

In another striking innovation in the world of electronic publications  and Web 2.0, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in its English version,  has published today a new online Wikibook entitled "Handbook of  Biomedical Informatics", version 1.0, after more than 5 months of  organization work. The book is based on articles published on the  subject by Wikipedia.

The book has 276 pages in its PDF version, and gathers, organizes and  classifies all the knowledge amassed by the Wikipedia articles on topics  in health informatics, telehealth, standards and classifications in  health informatics, and related topics, organized into 21 sections and  more than 250 entries. Thus, it is considered one of the most  comprehensive and complete books in the area.

Head on to the site and see for yourself!

I will give a review or update once I’ve time to run through the contents.

Just a quick observation: In the Wikipedia link, is it really Biomedicalnformatics? In all caps, this is how the namespace would look: BIOMEDICALNFORMATICS. There’s no I in Informatics.

People ask me often about what I do. Medical informatics can be a difficult concept.

At the start of my career, even my parents were confused. (Both my parents are lawyers, by the way.) My mother called my field "Medical Informatech", while I once heard my father describe my job as "Medical Robotics". My son told his cousins that his father "is a doctor but now he fixes computers for hospitals".

So, what is it exactly that I do as a Medical Informatics Consultant?

Let me go through what I did in the past 7 years to give you a better idea:

When I was with eHealthline, I had my first taste of project management. I managed timelines, gathered requirements and maintained project scope for a Hospital Information System (HIS) implementation for a Philippine hospital. I did requirements gathering and clinical systems analysis for an HIS implementation in Vietnam. I was part of the development team for a Pharmacy Management System for a Malaysian company.

When I worked with a Health NGO, I recommended e-learning and Web-based technologies for consumer health applications. I also developed Web-based systems. During this time, I also taught medical students on the use of computers and online resources for medical education.

When I did my Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Medical Informatics, I did researches for Web-based medical applications, mobile technologies, information search and retrieval and human-computer interaction. I also developed Web-based medical applications in PHP, MySQL and Ajax methods.

For my current work, I do combinations of many of these previously mentioned tasks along with strategic planning, vendor evaluation and implementation reviews.

Here’s the short list of what I do for the hospitals and organizations I work with:

• Project Management
• Clinical Systems Analysis
• Technology and Software Evaluation and Recommendation
• Healthcare IT Education and Advocacy
• Software Design and Development
• Strategic Planning

After explaining all these, my mother said, "I think I now get what it is exactly that you do—you solve problems in hospitals and in healthcare mainly through the use of computers and IT."

Exactly.

—

If you’re a Healthcare IT professional, how do you describe your job? What kind of work do you do?

Here’s a list of news, links and articles about Medical Informatics, Healthcare and IT that I found interesting this past week (May 10 – 16, 2009).

The Healthcare IT field is growing—and in the process of organizing itself.

A stimulus to define informatics and health information technology
A BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making article, it proposes a standard (or consesus) for definitions and terms of usage for Medical Informatics terminologies, including the difference between Clinical Informatics and Health Information Management. Formatted as a debate piece, it should spark discussions and interest among different Healthcare IT groups.

The Drive for More HIM Professionals
First there was AMIA 10×10 (10,000 trained by 2010). It later moved forward as 20/20—an international effort to educate 20,000 healthcare informaticists in other countries by 2020. Now, this article states that AHIMA “has developed Vision 2016 to help supply appropriately trained HIM professionals to meet the existing and growing demand.” Obviously, there is a growing need for more Healthcare IT professionals worldwide. We probably need to initiate something similar here in the Philippines.

Health IT players form EHR Stimulus Alliance for physician education
Vendors are making a collective effort to educate physicians in the use of electronic health records. This is part of a growing movement to increase adoption of Healthcare IT, collaboration between different parties and awareness of benefits of computerization.

What do these activities mean for Philippine Medical Informatics? What’s our next move?

—

Is there an interesting Healthcare IT-related link you’d like to share? Please post them below. Thanks!