Kudos for the Informatics Professor - Winter/Spring 2019 Update

I have had a busy but productive early 2019, with invited talks, publications, and other happenings.

I gave a few invited talks:

• Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records for Patient Cohort Discovery, Center for Genome Research & Biocomputing, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, February 25, 2019
• Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records for Patient Cohort Discovery, MU Informatics Institute, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, March 7, 2019
• The Clinical Impact of Clinical Informatics, Inspiring Experts Clifford G. Pilz Memorial Lecture, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL, April 16, 2019

The latter was a real honor, as it took place at my medical school alma mater, University of Illinois Chicago, and it was fun to see both informatics colleagues as well as some former classmates who attended the lecture.

I also had the opportunity to attend the inaugural induction of Fellows of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) at the AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference in Atlanta, GA on May 1, 2019. The initial group of FAMIA included 15 alumni and faculty of the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, comprising over 11% of the inaugural fellows. Below is a picture of OHSU alumni and myself who attended the induction ceremony.

I was also interviewed for an article in Medscape Internal Medicine about the new clinical informatics subspecialty.

I continue to serve on several scientific advisory boards:

• 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 my second meeting of the board in Cape Town, South Africa in July.
• RCMI Multidisciplinary And Translational Research Infrastructure EXpansion (RMATRIX), a translational research center of the John A. Burns School of Medicine of the University of Hawaii. The grant funding of this is ending, so this board will also be ending.
• ECRI Guidelines Trust (EGT) Technical Advisory Panel (TAP), a publicly available web-based repository of objective, evidence-based clinical practice guideline content that succeeds the Agency for Healthcare Quality & Research (AHRQ) National Guidelines Clearinghouse. (I also served on the Technical Expert Panel of National Practice Guidelines Clearinghouse when it was developed and launched by AHRQ from 1998-2002.)

I am also co-author on a couple papers that were published:

• Wang Y, Wen A, Liu S, Hersh W, Bedrick S, Liu H, Test collections for electronic health record-based clinical information retrieval, JAMIA Open, 2019, Epub ahead of print.
• Toll ET, Alkureshi MA, Lee WW, Babbott SF, Bain PA, Beasley JA, Frankel RM, Loveys AA, Wald HS, Woods SS, Hersh WR, Protecting healing relationships in the age of electronic health records: report from an international conference, JAMIA Open, 2019, Epub ahead of print.

I also had the pleasure, as I do every June, of seeing a new group of graduates from the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. This year saw 45 new alumni of the program honored. With these new graduates, the program has now awarded a total of 831 degrees and certificates dating back 22 years to the first graduates in 1998 (who started when the program launched in 1996). As some have completed more than one program degree or certificate (e.g., the Graduate Certificate and Master’s or the Master’s and PhD; one person has done all three!), the program has a total of 746 alumni.

Finally, AMIA has produced and posted videos for several of the courses in the 10x10 program. A video of myself describing the OHSU course has been posted on the main page for the program on the AMIA Web site.