Annual Reflections at the End of 2018

I always use my last posting of the year to this blog to reflect on the year past. As I have noted each year, this blog started at the time of a major transformation for the informatics field, namely the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Now, almost 10 years later (10-year anniversary post coming in March!), the era of “meaningful use” is drawing to a close.

The year 2018 was a year of milestones and gratitude for me. I celebrated my 60th birthday, grateful for my personal health and well-being. My immediate family, my wife and two children, are also doing very well in their personal as well as professional lives. This year also marked the 15th year of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), the department of which I have served as its one and only Chair. With DMICE, I am grateful not only of my own academic success but also providing an environment for faculty, students, and staff to achieve their accomplishments and gratitude.

Another milestone for 2018 was my 28th year at OHSU. It is somewhat uncommon these days for a high-profile academic to spend a whole career at a single institution. I have certainly been asked to look at other jobs over the years, as most academics always are, but nothing has ever appealed to me enough to consider leaving not only OHSU, but also Portland, Oregon. Since the Biomedical Information Communication Center (BICC) Building opened in 1991, I have had only two offices, and have been in my current one for over 20 years.

I am happy to report that despite my relatively static work location, I have changed and grown in place. In academia, like work in almost every other knowledge field, one must evolve their knowledge and skills with the evolution of their field. I am grateful that my job has afforded me the ability to grow professionally and intellectually. In fact, there are few things more exciting than being immersed in the field as new ideas and technologies emerge. A decade ago it was the emergence of the value of the electronic health record (EHR); today it is the growth of data and how we can put it to good use, such as via machine learning. But just as we learned with EHR adoption during the HITECH Act, implementing technology, especially in healthcare, does not always go according to plan. While the emergence of machine learning is exciting, it will be interesting to see how it will impact day-to-day medical practice.

Life does not last forever, but as long as I continue to enjoy my work and do it competently, I certainly have no plans to stop. It will also be interesting to see what new advances come down the pike in informatics, some of which we might be able to predict but others that will emerge out of nowhere.