Kudos for the Informatics Professor - Summer/Fall 2020 Update

You might not know it from the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic, but I was quite busy and productive since being relegated to virtual work since mid-March of 2020. In the last of my periodic kudos postings, I described all of what I accomplished in the first half of 2020, some of which took place during the early dark days of the pandemic. In the rest of 2020, I have published a number of scientific papers and book chapters as well as given a number of talks, some in distant places, albeit virtually.

Here is a list of papers published in the latter half of 2020:

• Chamberlin SR, Bedrick SD, Cohen AM, Wang Y, Wen A, Liu S, Liu H, Hersh WR, A query taxonomy describes performance of patient-level retrieval from electronic health record data, Health Search and Data Mining Workshop, Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) Conference, 2020.
• Roberts K, Alam T, Bedrick S, Demner-Fushman D, Lo K, Soboroff I, Voorhees E, Wang LL, Hersh WR, TREC-COVID: rationale and structure of an information retrieval shared task for COVID-19, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27: 1431-1436.
• Cohen A, Chamberlin S, Deloughery T, Nguyen M, Bedrick S, Ko JJ, Amin J, Wei A, Hersh W, Detecting rare diseases in electronic health records using machine learning and knowledge engineering: case study of acute hepatic porphyria, PLoS ONE, 15: e0235574.
• Fultz Hollis K, Roberts K, Bedrick S, Hersh WR, Addressing the search challenges of precision medicine with information retrieval systems and physician readers, Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 2020, 270: 813-817.
• Chamberlin SR, Bedrick SD, Cohen AM, Wang Y, Wen A, Liu S, Liu H, Hersh WR, Evaluation of patient-level retrieval from electronic health record data for a cohort discovery task, JAMIA Open, 3: 395-404.
• Liu S, Wang Y, Wen A, Wang L, Hong N, Shen F, Bedrick S, Hersh W, Liu H, Implementation of a cohort retrieval system for clinical data repositories using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model: proof-of-concept system validation, JMIR Medical Informatics, 8(10): e17376.
• Gray TR, McFarlane C, Finch M, Fuchs JM, Hersh W, Clouse J, Incentivizing change within social determinants of health using blockchain technology, Frontiers in Blockchain, 3: 10.3389/fbloc.2020.00040.

I also published a number of book chapters in the second part of this year (in addition to my own book, and stay tuned for some chapters in other books coming in the near future):

• Hersh W, Public Health in the Larger Context of Biomedical and Health Informatics, in Magnuson JA, Dixon B (eds.) Public Health Informatics and Information Systems, 3^rd Edition, New York: Springer, 2020, 31-41.
•  Hersh W, Online Continuing Education in Informatics - the AMIA 10x10 Experience, in Berner ES (ed.), Informatics Education in Healthcare: Lessons Learned, 2^nd Edition, New York: Springer, 2020, 251-262.
•  Hersh W, Open Educational Resources in Informatics, in Berner ES (ed.), Informatics Education in Healthcare: Lessons Learned, 2^nd Edition, New York: Springer, 2020, 277-285.

Here is a list of talks given since my last kudos posting:

• The Informatics Workforce and its Certification in the United States - XV Jornadas de Informática en Salud - Hospital Italiano Annual Conference, Buenos Aires, Argentina (virtual), November 3, 2020
• Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Health and Health Informatics - CBIS '20 - XVII Congresso Brasileiro de Informatica em Saude, Sao Paulo, Brazil (virtual), December 8, 2020
• The Informatics Response to COVID-19 - OHSU Department of Medicine Grand Rounds, Portland, OR, December 8, 2020

As noted earlier this year, I was elected President of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (aka, The Academy). Since then, OHSU featured a posting about it and I had a chance to represent the Academy in a panel with the World Health Organization and its Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The panel took place on December 16, 2020 and was entitled, Digital Health during COVID-19: Opportunities and Challenges. One of the topics I spoke on was the need for training and competence in informatics for both informatics as well as healthcare professionals.

 

As the pandemic relegated our educational program recruitment to virtual form, I had the opportunity to be featured with other faculty and students in promotional videos for our informatics educational programs:

• Our Master of Science (MS) program that offers thesis and non-thesis options for two majors: Health & Clinical Informatics and Bioinformatics & Computational Biomedicine. This program trains individuals to pursue a wide variety of professional careers in healthcare, industry, research, public health, and other settings.
• The OHSU Biomedical Informatics PhD program that prepares individuals for careers in research also in two areas: Health & Clinical Informatics and Bioinformatics & Computational Biomedicine. Most students in the program are supported through our NIH National Library of Medicine T15 Training Grant. (This training grant also offers funded postdoc positions for those seeking research careers who already have a doctoral degree in other field.)
• Our Clinical Informatics Subspecialty Fellowship that trains physicians aiming to become board-certified in the new subspecialty of clinical informatics. The ACGME-accredited fellowship requires certification in a primary specialty and offers the option of pursuing the MS degree.

I am pleased that 2020 turned out to be an academically productive year for me, but I am more than eager to return to normal living as vaccination and herd immunity are achieved for COVID-19 in 2021.