Kudos for the Informatics Professor - Fall 2016 Edition

The year 2016 has been a busy but fun year of personal achievements. Many of the notable accomplishments involved giving talks, both in person and online, and around the country and the world. However, I also had a number of other achievements.

A few months ago I posted about talks during the summer of 2016. The fall of 2016 was equally busy. As I noted at the end of the summer posting, I was slated to give two talks in September. The first was the opening talk at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Georgia Biomedical Informatics Course entitled, What is Biomedical Informatics? This talk was an updated version from the previous offering in this course delivered in April, 2016. In September, I also provided an online lecture in the National Institutes of Health BD2K Guide to the Fundamentals of Data Science Series entitled, Data Indexing and Retrieval.

In October, I had the opportunity to visit the world-renowned Geisinger Health System, where I met with a number of individuals who have taken courses of mine, both my 10x10 ("ten by ten") course as well as physicians in the new Clinical Informatics Fellowship who are taking online courses in the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. I also presented Grand Rounds on the topic of competencies in clinical informatics required of 21st-century clinicians and informaticians.

Also in October was the 25th Anniversary Celebration of the Biomedical Information Communication Center (BICC) at OHSU. The speakers at the event  included the current and long-time former Directors of the NLM. I provided an overview talk about the OHSU Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) and presented a poster on all of the collaboration that DMICE does at OHSU.

I started November with a talk at the OHSU Informatics Research Conference on Challenge Evaluations in Biomedical Information Retrieval, which was a preparation talk for another 25th anniversary talk to be mentioned in a moment.

In mid-November I was busy at the AMIA Annual Symposium, first leading a workshop on Evidence-Based Informatics at the Clinical Informatics Fellows’ Retreat that took place at my alma mater, the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Next I provided a talk at the AMIA Annual Symposium Learning Showcase entitled, The Full Spectrum Biomedical and Health Informatics Education at Oregon Health & Science University.

My final talk of the fall was at the Celebrating 25 Years of TREC Conference at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersurg, MD. My talk, The TREC Bio/Medical Tracks, described the various tracks in the biomedical domain at TREC over the years. A video of the talk is in Part 3 (starting around the 50-minute mark) of the Webcast archive page for the meeting.

What other accomplishments did I have this past fall? One was teaching my introductory biomedical and health informatics course to a group of clinical and IT leaders from Bangkok Duisuit Medical Services (BDMS), a network of hospitals in Thailand and a few in nearby countries. OHSU has an ongoing collaboration with BDMS in many areas, including informatics. This offering of the course had the usual recorded lectures and discussion forums, but added other activities, including interactive videoconferences and in-person sessions in both Bangkok and Portland. One of the participants in the course, Dr. Somsak Wankijcharoen, created a video of the experience.