Accolades for the Informatics Professor - Fall, 2014 Update

As always, I am pleased to share periodically with readers the various accolades and mentions that colleagues, projects, and I at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have received in recent months. This posting covers the mentions in the latter half of 2014.

In the late summer was a mention of my role in the American Medical Association (AMA) Accelerating Change in Medical Education Program of grants to medical schools to advance change in medical education. The OHSU grant has a component of informatics, with a focus on teaching 21st century physicians about data that they will use to facilitate their practices and others will use to assess the quality of care they deliver. One article focused on our development of competencies in clinical informatics for medical students, while the other described how we are implementing them in our AMA grant project.

OHSU also received a mention in a Web page purporting to rank the Top 25 "healthcare informatics" programs by "affordability". I am not sure exactly how they get their cost figures, but the page does accurately describe our program (number 16 on their list).

I received some other mentions concerning the new clinical informatics subspecialty, one in an article just before this year's board exam as well as in an interview with Stanford Program Director, Dr. Chris Longhurst.

Of course, the new subspecialty is one of many changes that informatics education has undergone recently, as noted both in an article I wrote as well as in one where I was interviewed.

I gave a number of talks that were recorded this fall, including my kick-off of our weekly OHSU informatics conference series as well as a talk about our Informatics Discovery Lab at the 2nd Annual Ignite Health event in Portland. The latter has an interesting format of five minutes to talk with slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds (for a total of 20 slides). The talk on the IDL led to my being invited to moderate a panel on business opportunities in health information technology in Portland.

There was also some press around the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) grants we received. Related to Big Data, another magazine called out my blog posting from last year that data scientists must also understand general research methodology.

Another news item mentioned a project I am likely to write about more in the future that concerns OHSU establishing collaborations in informatics and other areas in Thailand.

Finally, a few accolades came from events of the AMIA Annual Symposium 2014. One was getting my picture in HISTalk in a mention of the Fun Run at this year's symposium. I was also interviewed by a reporter who wanted to follow up on why I selected them items that I did for my top ten events of the year in my Year in Review talk. It was nice to be able to elaborate some and also watch the tweeting that followed.

It is gratifying to receive these accolades and of course I know have to keep doing innovative and important work to maintain them.