Dispatches from the hi-blogs.info krew

Welcome to SINI2010 – day 1 July 21, 2010

I have finally arrived here in a hot and humid Baltimore (hon) – from a hot and humid Washington DC – for the 20th anniversary SINI – http://nursing.umaryland.edu/sini/ At 2.30pm, the auditorium is filling up and we are nearly ready for the opening session.

I will be attempting to blog and tweet (hashtag #sini2010) from the event over the next few days.

Janet Allan, Dean of the School of Nursing, gave the opening welcome remarks. She noted that the School had started its first nursing informatics programme 22 years ago, and since has graduated over 500 nurses from informatics programmes. The theme of SINI2010 is ‘Nursing informatics: from first use to meaningful use’, and there are over 400 participants in the event.

Mary Etta Mills, conference co-chair followed and gave welcoming remarks to those attending in person and on webcast.

Dr Connie White Delaney (Professor and Dean, School of Nursing, University of Minnesota) is the opening keynote speaker, talking on “Nursing Informatics Empowering Meaningful Use: People, Processes, and Policy”. She began by noting that informatics is her ‘key addiction’ and noted the collegiality that exists in the nursing informatics community. She also noted that nurses have always been involved in person-centred care and the ‘meaningful use’ of data to support care.

Connie says that it is important that nurses’ voices be heard in the electronic health records, as well as the voices of people and families. She gave an overview of the funding opportunities that are expected, and are being granted, towards the development of initiatives in the area of health IT – eg, the funding of research to move beyond the barriers to IT adoption, and to support the development of national interoperability work. The focus, she notes, needs to be on the achievement of quality healthcare for all, through the use of health IT – but that we need to acknowledge the inter-professional and international aspects that have to be addressed.

Connie noted that the outcomes and discussions of many of the meetings of the HIT Policy Committee and HIT Standards Committee, and other related work, are available through the HealthIT website – via http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt

Privacy and security, she says, are foundational to achieving meaningful use for health IT, and for developing electronic health information exchange; they are critical to building a foundation of trust to enable/support meaningful use by providers, hospitals, consumers and patients.

Connie notes that health information exchange is currently very patchy, and much work needs yet to be done.

After Connie finishes, we will move on to the traditional Exhibitor Evening and Dinner, held at the University.