Kudos for the Informatics Professor - 2018 Update

It has been a while since I have posted one of my periodic kudos for the Informatics Professor, so let me take the opportunity to do so for late 2017 and early 2018.

A blog posting of mine received some unexpected attention. As I always do when responding to a government Request for Information (RFI), I posted comments in my blog that I submitted to the RFI for the NIH draft Data Science plan. My main point was that while the plan was a good start, it needed to have more to achieve the optimal value for data science related to health and research. First, the blog posting was picked up by Politico (about a third of the way down the page). I was then asked by National Library of Medicine (NLM) Director Patricia Brennan to re-write it as a guest posting to the NLM Director’s Blog.

Last month, I took part in the inaugural meeting of the International Academy for Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI), a new Academy of 121 elected members who are leaders in informatics from around the world. With about 50 others from the Academy, I took part in a day-long meeting that was co-located with Medical Informatics Europe 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden.

I am also honored to be invited to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Pan African Bioinformatics Network for H3Africa (H3ABionet), which provides bioinformatics support for the Human Heredity and Health in Africa Project (H3Africa). I will be attending the next meeting of the SAB in Cape Town, South Africa in July. I have been asked to contribute based on my expertise in clinical informatics.

I also gave some invited international talks, including:

• IR Meets EHR: Retrieving Patient Cohorts for Clinical Research Studies - Centre International de Mathématiques et d’Informatique (CIMI), University of Toulouse, Toulouse, FR, February 9, 2018
• Caveats and Recommendations for Re-Use of Large-Scale Operational Electronic Health Record Data - Association for Medical and BioInformatics Singapore (AMBIS) and National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, Singapore, February 23, 2018

Back in the US, the AMIA Clinical Informatics Fellows (ACIF) group has been publishing a series of podcasts. I was delighted to be interviewed for one of them.

Finally, I have authored a chapter in a newly published book: Rydell RL and Landa HM (eds.), The CMIO Survival Guide: A Handbook for Chief Medical Information Officers and Those Who Hire Them, 2nd Edition, CRC Press, 2018. My chapter is entitled, Education and Professional Development for the CMIO. (Surprise!)