Kudos for the Informatics Professor, Winter/Spring 2017

As always, I have had the ongoing opportunity to publish, speak, and otherwise disseminate information about the informatics in the new year since my last “kudos” posting last fall.

One accolade I received was election as an inaugural member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). Informatics leaders from around the world voted to establish the initial membership of 121 leaders from around the world. I was delighted to be among the inaugural group who will be inducted during the 16th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (Medinfo 2017) in Hangzhou, China in August, 2017.

I am also pleased to report on a major accomplishment of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, of which I am Director, received notice of renewal of its NIH National Library of Medicine (NLM) Training Grant in Biomedical Informatics & Data Science. The grant will provide $3.8 million to fund PhD and postdoc students in the program over the next five years.

During this time I also had the opportunity to publish a chapter in an important new book published by the American Medical Association, which I have already written about (Hersh W, Ehrenfeld J, Clinical Informatics, in Skochelak SE and Hawkins RE (eds.), Health Systems Science, 2017, 105-116).

I also gave a number of talks during this time, including one at the Data Day Health event in Austin, TX on January 15, 2017. The title of my talk was, Big Data Is Not Enough: People and Systems Are Needed to Benefit Health and Biomedicine.

I gave another talk at an interesting conference devoted to the challenges of the electronic health record. The conference, The Patient, the Practitioner, and the Computer, took place in Providence, RI on March 17-19, 2017. The title of my talk was, Talk, Failure to Translate: Why Have Evidence-Based EHR Interventions Not Generalized? This talk laid the groundwork for my subsequent blog posting published in this blog as well as The Health Care Blog.

Finally, I also had the opportunity to lead a couple of webinars. One was for the H3ABioNet Seminars series of the Pan African Bioinformatics Network for H3Africa, which took place on April 18, 2017 and covered the same topic as the Data Day Health talk described above.

The other Webinar, Implementing Clinical Informatics in the MD Curriculum and Beyond, was delivered to the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada on June 13, 2017.