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Healthcamp Toronto September 16, 2009

Posted by peterjmurray in conference, health informatics, unconference.
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Peter is at his first healthcamp/barcamp, here in Toronto. A lot of interesting, enthusiastic people here to look at a wide variety of issues. The formal website for the event, which will have summaries, conversations, links, etc is at http://www.socialtext.net/hctoronto/index.cgi?healthcamptoronto

A lot of the major conversation will be via Twitter – search using #hcTO

I am here to learn what these events are all about, how they work, etc., and what benefits there can be out of them.

UPDATE: 17 Sept. Healthcamp Toronto was an interesting experience; @carlosrizo and all his colleagues at the Innovation Cell did a great job of organising and running it – and of trying to capture all the conversations, which is a difficult task. It wil be interesting to see the various analyses that come out of it. Having been involved in running quite a few similarly semi-structured workshops etc. in the past, I appreciate the challenges of trying to get away from talking heads and monologues and death by powerpoint, etc.

The idea of having a ‘wall’ where people could post what they wanted to discuss in sessions worked well; although requires you to think quickly and try to grasp what the session ‘leader’ is looking to explore. A lot of the session notes, together with video clips and photos are on the website; I recommend you to go and explore that. A few ideas/issues I picked up from the sessions I went to:

  • how do we bring people without technical skills into using online tools? – how do we overcome some of digital divides?
  • will social networking tools become part of people’s normal social landscape in the future, and so these become ‘non-issues’ in the future?
  • there were many differing views of the value of content on some online discussion areas – some suggest low value (too much ‘noise’), some report studies that give high value/accurate information (more accurate information often in areas for more specific/specialised diseases).
  • do we need filtering of information, or does the good material rise and stay, and the dross fall away (via crowdsourcing etc)?
  • what do we mean by Web 3.0 and what will it mean for health? (search Twitter for comments here).
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The discussion 'grid'

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Welcome to healthcamp - the rules of healthcamp ....

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A Healthcamp Wordle from live analysis of tweets

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Friday Opening Keynote Session SINI 2009 07.24.09 July 24, 2009

Posted by Scott Erdley in conference, education, Keynote, nursing informatics, patient safety, SINI2009, speaker.
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Paut Tang, MD, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, titled “Personalizing Health Care: Creating a Patient’s Health Home”. For missing pieces of this blog please consult Peter Murray (@peterjmurray) and or Margaret Hansen (@m2hansen) tweets. Interactive presenter with good audience appeal. Not medical home but health home. Defining health via proverbs and personal anecdotes. Outline of presentation is traditional health care, a definition of phr, personalizing and then creating a patient’s ‘health home’. Draws from ION 2001 ‘Chasm’ report for definition of health. Jim Collins, “Good to Great” book referenced, needs to focus on ‘who, then what?’ ’cause ‘who’ will take ‘you’ to ‘what’. How to support patient & family? So, turn to patients first. Derive a phr definition based on patient perspectives is next goal. Draws from his past research using patient focus groups as well as newer work / studies by organizations such as the Markle Foundation. Privacy is a very common and strong concern by those who participated in research studies. Utilizes example, which is included in his work flow, of patient & provider communication and information exchange. Neat part is captured into medical record, shared, of all communications between these 2 parties. Online survey yearly of patients and their use of this systems (PAMF – forgot what is stands for – sorry). Self efficacy is big point (test charts help visualize; lab results graphic; ‘score card’ is in front, and so forth). It is a report card for the patient, which changes lives. Online reminders enhance adherence to health maintenance guidelines (4-fold increase in breast mammography testing due to such reminders).

Paul Tang presenting at SINI2009

Paul Tang presenting at SINI2009

Traditional disease management is protocol driven (aka – you got the disease, we got the treatment [and sometimes the same for all, too]). Asked patients, in this study, about support structure perceived by the patients / study participants. Describes chronic care model as also indicative of health care overall. To be patient centered start with (my) risk profile, then (my) disease condition and finally (my) agenda. In this diabetic study report, they created diabetes dashboard for patients. Diabetes, for example, becomes much more self management versus traditional paper-based with time disadvantage. Online allows more timely review and behavioral changes by patient and provider along with eliminating paper (also provides longitudinal view / trending to help communicate and or change behavior). A follow-up clinical trial is now planned for 400 diabetic patients (200 intervention & 200 control). Conclusions include phr/ehr integration as optimal approach. Very very personable speaker and very well received by audience. Q&A session followed.

IMIA Education WG – Tuesday morning October 28, 2008

Posted by peterjmurray in education, health informatics, IMIA.
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The wireless networks are much more flakey this morning, so I will upload this post hoc from notes. The first session this morning was looking at ‘Designing an international survey on curricular needs’, lead by Harold Lehman from Johns Hopkin in Baltimore. Harold, Bill Hersh from Oregon and Julio Facelli from Utah gave some opening remarks setting the context for the workshop. Bill mentioned the need for learning more about our students’ education needs, and Julio talked about the need for a quantitative framework for assessment of effectiveness and needs in biomedical informatics.

Harold talked about a similar survey he had done in public health informatics; this had several axes, ie the essential services, the informatics competencies, and the skill levels (referring to practitioners, as opposed to informaticians).

We had a workshop discussion of a range of issues in what kind of survey to develop, and who to survey; opinion seemed evenly split on whether it was more important to survey informaticians or clinical professionals who are not informaticians. Several people gave their experiences of doing previous surveys and of what work existed on which the development of the survey might draw. An example was given of contrasting online and paper-based surveys, with the former being returned more by informaticians and the latter returned more by clinicians. Consensus after discussion was that, for the first iteration, we should focus on surveying health informatics alumni, and that members of the IMIA Education WG might form a pilot group for the survey. Work on this will be developed further following the meeting.

For the second part of the morning, Don Detmer and Alvaro Margolis presented a report on ‘Making the ehealth connection: health informatics and ehealth capacity building’, based in a report on the Bellagio eHealth meetings organised earlier in 2008 by the Rockefeller Foundation.  A session was organised by AMIA and IMIA as part of the Bellagio meetings on ehealth capacity building, and in particular through looking at the global ‘south’ components of needs and 20/20 vision for assuring ehealth capacity. Don talked about the need for surveying national readiness for developing informatics skills and knowledge, and for assessment instruments and other tool kits. He cited the idea of 20/20 ‘bits and bytes’  knowledge and skills offerings, as well as the need for executive seminars, training and advocacy to develop informatics awareness among leaders.

Alvaro summarised the goals of the Bellagio week, including defining 2-5 year actions that IMIA, AMIA and other stakeholders could undertake, the need for a network of people to support the work, and for identifying the informatics needs of developing countries. A useful and dynamic discussion explored a lot of ideas, and the attendees seemed generally enthusiastic for involvement in aspects of the proposals being explored.