Health Informatics Blog

HC 2008 in Harrogate is taking place on 21-23 April.

A 3 day conference and exhibition for everyone involved in handling and managing information in healthcare. Matthew Swindells, Department of Health’s acting chief information officer, has been confirmed as the opening speaker at HC2008. He is expected to talk in his keynote presentation on the strategic role of information in the NHS, and, in particular, the part it plays in supporting and delivering changes described in the interim ‘Darzi review’.

Link

Eric Schmidt delivers a keynote speech at HIMSS 2008 on Google’s activities in the healthcare space.

Gunther Eysenbach has announced the date and location of his latest conference and accompanying theme issue of JMIR:

Medicine 2.0

  

Call for Papers: Medicine 2.0 - How social networking and Web 2.0 technologies revolutionize health care, wellness, clinical medicine and biomedical research

In the past few years we have seen the rapid evolution of new tools and programming techniques collectively called “Web 2.0 tools”, which facilitate the development of collaborative and user-friendly Web applications.
Typically, the Web 2.0 is a term which refers to a) improved communication between people via social-networking technologies, b) improved communication between separate software applications (”mashups”) via open Web standards for describing and accessing data, and c) improved Web interfaces that mimic the real-time responsiveness of desktop applications within a browser window. Semantic web applications (sometimes called Web 3.0) and 3D environments (Second Life) can also be seen as second generation Web technologies.
These technologies have led to a flurry of new applications and speculation on their potential to revolutionize health care and the entire spectrum of health and medicine – from consumer-led preventive medicine, home care, to clinical care. This coincides with a strong push towards personal health records, with major players such as Microsoft and Google entering the scene. High-profile takeovers and valuations of companies such as YouTube or Facebook also have led to a flurry of investment activities - Venture Capitalists are once again investing in Web start-ups, but much of the linguistics and hype is reminiscent of the Web 1.0 bubble in the late 90ies.
As academics, we have the responsibility to look beyond the hype, and to dissect what works and what doesn’t.
As the leading peer-reviewed journal in eHealth, JMIR, together with a number of sponsoring organizations, is currently preparing the first academic international “Medicine 2.0″^TM conference on Sept 4th/5th 2008 in Toronto (MaRS Conference Centre). (to receive more information about this conference please register with this site). Note that with the term “medicine” we do not necessarily mean clinical medicine, but also preventive medicine, and the part of “medicine” which is the consumers’ responsibility.
This cutting edge conference will bring together academics and business leaders and is hoped to catalyze new collaborations between academia, health providers, and the private sector.
We envision this to be an annual conference, with peer-reviewed contributions, panels, and invited speakers, focussing on “next generation medicine”, which incorporates ideas of collaboration and consumer empowerment.
To celebrate the first Medicine 2.0 conference in 2008, JMIR will publish a “Medicine 2.0” Theme Issue focussing on Web 2.0 applications for health, health care, and the future of medicine. We will publish peer-reviewed research articles, reviews, tutorials, and viewpoints (opinion articles).

NEW Submission deadline for full articles: March 3rd, 2008.

Examples for topics that are within the scope of the theme issue as well as the conference include the following:

• Collaborative Filtering and recommender technologies
• Consumer empowerment
• Personal health records and Web 2.0
• New models of academic / scholarly publishing and peer review, e.g. what is the role of blogs and wikis?
• New models of e-learning, patient education, medical training and continuing medical education
• Youth and digital learning
• Business models in a Web 2.0 environment: User-generated content is free - so who makes money how? What is the role of the private sector?
• Developing and nurturing online communities for health
• The nature and dynamics of social networks
• Web 2.0 approaches for clinical practice, clinical research, quality monitoring, public health and biosurveillance
• How patient - physicians relationship change based on Web 2.0 platforms
• Virtual health care learning environments (web 3D: eg second health
and the ALIVE project at U of Southern Queensland, Australia)
• Use of Web 2.0 applications in health care and education (eg
YouTube…UC Berkeley is the first US university to put lectures
online via YouTube)
• Semantic Web applications

Prospective authors are encouraged to send an email with the title and an abstract to the editor at geysenba at gmail.com (email subject: “Medicine 2.0 theme issue”).
We also welcome inquiries regarding potential speakers and co-sponsoring organizations of the Medicine 2.0 conference.

Manuscripts must follow the Instructions for Authors. Note that JMIR is an Open Access journal and our regular publication fees apply (submission fee and - for non-institutional members - Article Processing Fee in case of acceptance).

To submit, please register as author and make sure to select the section “Special Theme Issue: Medicine 2.0″ when you submit the paper.

About JMIR
JMIR (http://www.jmir.org) is a leading Open-Access peer-reviewed transdisciplinary journal with an impact factor (2006) of 2.9, making it one of the top journals in the fields of medical informatics (#2 of 20) and health services research (#6 of 56). It is also indexed in Medline and other major databases with global reach.

Kevin Peyton has put up the slides from his presentation on Web 2.0 in Healthcare from the Health Informatics Society of Ireland conference:

Links:

The presentation at slideshare.net
Health Informatics Society of Ireland
The Health Tech Blog

CHIME have published the abstract of the recent Delphi study looking at Health Informatics in undergraduate medical education:

Health Informatics Education for Medical Students - International Delphi Study

Authors: Dr Puspavally Ramasamy and Jeannette MurphyThis page describes a recent research study. The proformas used in the study can be downloaded from this site.

Abstract

Introduction: Progress in introducing health informatics into the medical curriculum has been slow. There is still uncertainty as to which learning outcomes are relevant for prequalification students.

Aim: To produce a definitive list of Health Informatics knowledge and competencies relevant to undergraduate medical education.

Methods: A Delphi study was carried out to determine which health informatics learning outcomes are most relevant for undergraduate medical students. There were two phases to the study: (i) development of the a set of learning outcomes to be presented to the panels; (ii) a two round Delphi exercise to see which of the learning outcomes were endorsed by the respondents. 61 international experts were recruited for the study - from the domains of health informatics and medical education.

Findings: Of the 48 learning outcomes submitted to the panels, 25 were rated as Essential or Desirable by at least 85% of the respondents. Respondents also provided their views on how the subject should be taught and the obstacles to incorporating health informatics into the curriculum. The learning outcomes deemed the most important were: Information finding skills; knowledge of legal and ethical principles when dealing with and communicating patient data; knowledge of quality information sources to support clinical care; awareness of best practice in communicating with clinicians, patients and health service managers; skills in electronic communication (informed by local security and confidentiality guidelines). Items relating to specific technologies and applications (e.g. the structure and design of electronic health records, computerized order entry systems, medical imaging, telemedicine) were seen as less relevant for medical students. On the whole, the views of the two groups were similar, although the IMIA group put greater weight on issues relating to technology, while Medical Education group saw knowledge management as the priority.

Conclusion: The enthusiastic response to the Delphi study (particularly from the UK Medical Education Online Forum) suggests more guidance would be welcome to promote a better understanding and acceptance of HI education within the undergraduate medical curriculum. The results derived from this study may assist medical schools when reviewing the role of health informatics in their curricula. The barriers to integrating health informatics into the curriculum are quite real and appear not to have changed over the past decade.

This work is to be presented at Informatics Education Europe II - A Conference on the State of Informatics Education In Europe ( Greece , Nov 2007), Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

The paper will appear in the conference proceedings. This paper is based on an MSc dissertation to be submitted to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh/University of Bath by Dr Puspavally Ramasamy. The research supervisor was Jeannette Murphy, CHIME.

The proformas used for this Two Round Delphi Study are available in PDF format for other researchers. Anyone wishing to use these proformas is asked to contact the authors and to acknowledge the source.

• Proforma for Round One
• Proforma for Round Two

Contacts:

Dr Puspavally Ramasamy, p.alva@mailme.ae
Jeannette Murphy, j.murphy@chime.ucl.ac.uk
http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk/research/hiems/

Register now for the 2007 Royal Society of Medicine PDA and Smartphone Workshop in London on October 9th.The workshop aims to cover a wide range of topics about mobile computing in healthcare and is being run by Dr Mo Al-Ubaydli and myself.

Register here.

Hi Folks,

Welcome to the new Health Informatics Blog! This blog will be covering news and developments in the field of Health Informatics.

I’m a Lecturer in Health Informatics at Otago University in New Zealand and am currently working on a PhD looking at EHR and e-Learning standards.