It’s nice to take a break from the post-election madness and think again about the real work ahead in making American healthcare great. (And healthcare in other countries, too, because there’s a pretty large international contingent at the 2016 American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium. We heard Spanish, Portuguese, French and Japanese being spoken)
The meeting got underway Sunday afternoon and evening in Chicago with a lot of awards and professional certifications being handed out. Go search #AMIA2016 on Twitter if you care about those.
Like so many others in healthcare, medical and nursing informaticians are struggling to keep up with the changes. (The academically inclined AMIA prefers “informaticians” to “informaticists,” but the two terms are pretty interchangeable.)
There was some academic research presented on Sunday. Dr. Aaron Neinstein of the University of California, San Francisco discussed issues with getting innovations in health IT, digital health and general healthcare delivery to scale.
Innovation isn't scaling b/c: (1/7) Tight health IT budgets. (2/7) No scalable dist platform for apps. –@AaronNeinstein #AMIA2016 pic.twitter.com/EMXYFp6qbX
— Steven Chan, MD MBA (@StevenChanMD) November 14, 2016
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Of course, UCSF had an answer to that problem, namely the Connected Health Interoperability Platform, developed in conjunction with Cisco Systems.
In other sessions, at least one presenter talked about how genomics is making its way into the informatics equation. MedCity News is all about convergence, so we will have more later this week.
There will be plenty more research and case studies to report on the next three days, but the real action on Sunday was at the opening reception. Everyone was pitching their technology and interoperability ideas — Health Level Seven International’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard seems to be popular — and many academic medical centers were hiring. For real.
A popular spot — and not just because it was near the hors d’oeuvres — was the work-in-progress pictured above. An artist took suggestions from some of the 2,500 expected attendees and visualized why they thought medical informatics was important, or why they got into the field.
As one commenter put it, “A clinician can influence one patient,” at least at a time. An informatician can influence hundreds of thousands.”
Photo: Neil Versel/MedCity News
