Annual Reflections at the End of 2024 - And the Future of This Blog

It has been my practice in this blog in my last post of each year to reflect back on the year. Not so much to review everything that happened, but rather to give some general thoughts about what the field, my work in it, and this blog have accomplished and where things are going.

It has of course been another banner year for the informatics field, especially driven by the accomplishments and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). Dating back to 2009, this blog has highlighted the big happenings of the field, starting with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, especially the educational opportunities enabled by it. We then moved on to making use of the data from the electronic health record (EHR) adoption that was incentivized by the HITECH Act that contributed to the vast quantities of data we now have and culminating in the advances of AI.

One aspect of my reflection this year concerns this blog itself. Readers can look to the right and notice that my number of postings has been declining in recent years. This does not reflect any change in my productivity but is more of a reflection of the uncertainty of my specific devotion to blogging. In the coming months, I will decide how long I wish to maintain this blog as a vehicle for sharing my thoughts about the field. I have not yet decided to cease blogging, but I am thinking about other uses of the time I have devoted to sharing my thinking.

One reason for my possibly moving away from this type of blogging is the emergence of so-called microblogging and other social media platforms. While I prefer the permanence of a regular blog like this, providing a much more distinctive history of my thinking, it is much easier to post insights to social media and have that serve as a record of my thoughts and interactions with others about them.

Another reflection on this past year concerns the direction of my country, the United States of America. Given the results of our 2024 elections, it is clear that enough of a majority of people, and electoral college votes, wish to change the direction of our country. This blog has never gone too far beyond healthcare and informatics. Not that I do not have a lot of views about politics and other happenings about the world, but rather I have aimed to keep this blog focused.

I will maintain these boundaries but note that the new leadership of health-related entities in the US could take our country in a profoundly different direction. Not only in healthcare but also in research, education, and more. I hope the worst of the new leadership’s tendencies will not be realized. I note a similarity to how I felt at the end of 2016.

These two issues - my thoughts on maintaining this blog and the changing political directions in the US - come together in my assessment of the new social media landscape. I have not written much in this blog in recent years about social media, but I had been making more use of Twitter now X, especially for scientific awareness (as opposed to my personal life, for which I am part of what my millennial children call the "Facebook generation"). I have now joined the exodus to BlueSky, and hope that it will be a place for scientific fields as well as rational news coverage.

Despite these uncertainties, I still maintain my optimism for the things that matter most in my life. My family, my friends, and the world of informatics that has brought tremendous career satisfaction and the joy of seeing so many colleagues, mentees, and others achieve success and provide great value through this field.

Kudos for the Informatics Professor - 2024 Update

Since my beginnings with this blog, I have periodically, in most recent years annually, posted a review of my professional accomplishments, including talks given, papers published, honors, and more. The past couple years have been a transition me, stepping back from leadership positions as Chair of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) and as Director of the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. As seen in this post, however, my productivity has not missed a beat in the past year, and in fact I am enjoying my work as much as ever by being able to focus on teaching, research, and writing.

Like many in informatics, I continue to be in demand as a speaker on informatics, especially (but not limited to) the topic of artificial intelligence (AI). Links to slides and references and sometimes videos from the talks are available on my Web site.

I served as a Keynote Speaker at two medical schools as well as for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Academic Forum Annual Retreat:

• Keynote Speaker, Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine Research Day, Novi, MI, Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Clinical Practice, Research, and Education, April 11, 2024
• AMIA Academic Forum Keynote Talk (virtual), Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Health Professions Education, June 18, 2024
• Keynote Speaker, Fifth Annual Medical Student Research Symposium at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, Las Vegas, NV, Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Clinical Practice, Research, and Education, October 5, 2024

I also gave many other invited talks during the year on AI and other topics in informatics:

• Society for Academic Continuing Medical Education (virtual), Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Health Professions Education, January 22, 2024
• ACMI Symposium, Kona, HI, The Critical Need to Build the Evidence Base for AI Implementations in Biomedicine and Health, February 11, 2024
• Clinical Informatics Fellowship Seminar Series, University of North Carolina (virtual), Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Health Professions Education, February 21, 2024
• Clinical Community Conversations, Oregon Public Health Continuing Medical Education (virtual), Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Promise and Peril, March 4, 2024
• 4th International Conference on Public Health 2024, Khyber Medical University, Peshawar, Pakistan (virtual), Biomedical and Health Informatics: An Essential Discipline for 21st Century Medicine, April 17, 2024
• Bridge2AI Voice AI Webinar (virtual), Artificial Intelligence in Medicine and Medical Education: Critical Issues and Potential Solutions, April 23, 2024
• OHSU Summer Internship Faculty Presentation, Portland, OR, Applying Information Retrieval to the Electronic Health Record for Cohort Discovery, June 27, 2024
• Grand Rounds, Samaritan Health Systems, Corvallis, OR (virtual), Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Clinical Practice, Research, and Education, October 9, 2024
• OHSU Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology Conference, Portland, OR, Results and Implications for Generative AI in Education, October 24, 2024
• Faculty Seminar, Clark College, Vancouver, WA (virtual), Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Medicine and Medical Education, October 30, 2024
• Improving Primary Care Through Industrial and Systems Engineering (I-PrACTISE) Colloquium, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (virtual), Results and Implications for Generative AI in Education, December 6, 2024

I was also invited this year to speak on several panels:

• HIMSS Oregon, Translational AI, on panel, Impacts of New Technology in Healthcare, Portland, OR, January 22, 2024
• Accelerate Happy Hour & Fireside Chat Discussion Panel, Oregon Bioscience Incubator and OTRADI, Bioethics and Healthcare Decisions, March 7, 2024
• American Medical Association, STEPS Forward Webinar (virtual), The Human Factor in Solving Problems: Modeling Successful Collaboration Among People, Technology, and Institutions, August 20, 2024
• Medical Informatics Europe 2024, Search Meets Generative AI: A Challenge Evaluation for Reference Attribution, on panel, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics Plenary Scientific Discussion, Athens, Greece, August 26, 2024
• Data Science Initiative for Africa, 4th Annual Consortium Meeting, Computational Omics and Biomedical Informatics Program (COBIP), on panel, Training Working Group, Mauritius, November 18, 2024

I also participated in an enjoyable podcast as part of the Informatics in the Round podcast series led by colleague Kevin Johnson, MD, MS. The podcast title was, Life After Leadership, and featured a discussion of faculty careers after stepping down from serving as department chairs in biomedical informatics.

In addition to postings to this blog, I was also invited to post to the Director’s Blog of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Musings from the Mezzanine blog on the topic, Translational AI: A Necessity and Opportunity for Biomedical Informatics and Data Science.

And of course, I had a successful year with more conventional academic products, namely publication of papers and book chapters:

• Hersh W, Search still matters: information retrieval in the era of generative AI, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2024, 31: 2159–2161. A perspective piece on why retrieval of articles, documents, etc. is still important in the era of large language models (LLMs)
• Sivarajkumar S, Mohammad HA, Oniani D, Roberts K, Hersh W, Liu H, He D, Visweswaran S, Wang Y, Clinical information retrieval: a literature review, Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research, 2024, 8: 313-352.
• Hersh W, A quarter-century of online informatics education: learners served and lessons learned, Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2024, 26: e59066. At the 25th anniversary of JMIR, an invited paper to reflect on my 25 years of online teaching.
• Hersh W, Fultz Hollis K, Results and implications for generative AI in a large introductory biomedical and health informatics course, npj Digital Medicine, 2024, 7: 247. An analysis finding that LLMs do very well in my introductory biomedical informatics course, with implications for student learning and assessment.
• Azzopardi L, Clarke CLA, Kantor P, Mitra B, Trippas JR, Ren Z, Aliannejadi M,  Arabzadeh N, Chandrasekar R, de Rijke M, Eustratiadis P, Hersh W, Huang J, Kanoulas E, Kareem J, Li Y, Lupart S, Mekonnen KA, Roegiest A, Soboroff I, Silvestri F, Verberne S, Vos D, Yang E, Zhao Y. Report on the Search Futures Workshop at ECIR 2024, SIGIR Forum, 58: 1-41, 2024.
• Gupta D, Demner-Fushman D, Hersh W, Bedrick S, Roberts K, Overview of TREC 2024 Biomedical Generative Retrieval (BioGen) Track, The Thirty-Third Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2024) Conference Notebook.
• Hersh W, Roberts K, IR in Biomedicine, in Alonso O, Baeza-Yates R (eds.), Information Retrieval: Advanced Topics and Techniques, ACM Press, 2025, 577-610.

I also had a productive year continuing work on grants first awarded in prior years:

• 5T15LM007088 (PI Hersh), National Library of Medicine, Research Training in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Oregon Health & Science University. Predoctoral and postdoctoral T15 training grant in biomedical informatics and data science.
• 2R01LM011934 (Hersh MPI with Liu), National Library of Medicine, Semi-structured Information Retrieval in Clinical Text for Cohort Identification. Use of natural language processing and information retrieval techniques for cohort discovery for research studies from electronic health records.
• 1U2RTW012131 (Hersh MPI with Bendou), NIH Fogarty International Center, Computational Omics and Biomedical Informatics Program (COBIP), Data Science Initiative for Africa. Collaboration with University of Cape Town to develop and implement graduate degree programs to train African biomedical data scientist students and faculty in data science, computational omics, clinical informatics and imaging data science, with courses in clinical informatics provided online by OHSU.
• 1R25LM014207 (Hersh PI), National Library of Medicine, Attracting Talented and Diverse Students to Biomedical Informatics and Data Science Careers Through Short-Term Study at OHSU. Summer internship program for underrepresented college undergraduates in biomedical informatics and data science.
• 1R01HS027796 (Eden, PI), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Implementing USPSTF Recommendations for Breast Cancer Screening and Prevention by Integrating Clinical Decision Support Tools with the Electronic Health Record. Demonstrate the ability of the EHR to securely exchange information with MammoScreen using interoperable, standards-based approaches; provide appropriate clinical and patient decision support for users; and to evaluate its use among patients and clinicians using mixed methods based on the RE-AIM framework.
• 1OT2OD032720 (Bensoussan, PI), NIH Common Fund, Voice as a Biomarker of Health: Building an ethically sourced, bioaccoustic database to understand disease like never before. Data acquisition project for voice as biomarker for health and disease in NIH Bridge2AI Program. Included an administrative supplement to participate in a Voice AI Summer School with three other universities.

I also kept quite busy with my teaching activities during the year, mainly teaching my introductory course in biomedical informatics. The full course is taught to audiences of graduate students, medical students, and continuing education students. The latter audience takes the course as part of the 10x10 (“ten by ten”) program in partnership with the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). The course reached a milestone this year by surpassing over 3300 individuals who have completed the course dating back to its inception in 2005. Another change this year is the recognition of the central role of AI in biomedical informatics and healthcare generally, with the course name changing to, Introduction to Biomedical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. The curriculum is mostly the same, since AI has already been a growing part of biomedical informatics, and now it is explicitly recognized in the title of the course.

I did receive an award and another honor this year. I was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the honorific society for the biomedical informatics field. I was also invited to give the Faculty Address at the OHSU School of Medicine Graduate Studies Hooding & Completion Ceremony on June 2.