So the Health Informatics Society of Australia‘s (HISA) annual Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2010) is over for another year. A few observations/thoughts following the annual health informatics fire hydrant that is HIC:
- NEHTA is still getting a lot of bad press. An example is Trish Greenhalgh‘s comment “To be honest, I am bloody confused about what NEHTA’s role is. I wonder if it’s because NEHTA is confused about its own role” in Charles Wright’s ehealthcentral.com.au article.
- Trish’s talk got my vote for the best keynote (although I didn’t see them all). Trisha presented some nice slides on organisational change theory to help explain “big health IT” projects. I can’t find her slides anywhere, but they’d be worth a look if you’re interested.
- Of the HIC papers I reviewed or saw presented, the following stood out:
- Koray Atalag’s paper On the maintainability of openEHR based health information systems – an evaluation study in endoscopy quantified the differences between using an openEHR -based implementation against a “traditional” information system. For me the paper provides even more evidence to support openEHR-based systems.
- Matt Hou’s paper on Sensitive and confidential: implementing online documentation for sexual assault and domestic violence assessments described some interesting EHR privacy and confidentiality requirements.
- My colleague Anthony Nguyen’s paper Structured pathology reporting for cancer from free text: lung cancer case study is an interesting application of SNOMED-CT and machine learning (note the disclaimer below).
- This is my third HIC. Maybe I’m just getting more cynical as I get older, but there wasn’t any new products demonstrated at the HIC exibition that jumped out at me as the Next Big Thing in health informatics. Lots of the same crowd and products. Could it be the slow progress in health IT and uncertainty from the election mean new products aren’t really happening? I’m sure a few companies were also GFC‘d and HIC may not have been a priority in their budget.
- The Australian E-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) launched Minnow, which isn’t “new” in that it’s the SNOMED-CT browser parts (subset!) of the Snapper mapping tool. I don’t want to blow AEHRC’s trumpet too much (see the disclaimers below), but at least it go launched at HIC!.
- I got to act as char for the “Technology Improving Care” session. I managed to get everyone out on time for lunch and people actually laughed at some of my banter and repartee.
- In HISA news, Queensland Health has negotiated a membership deal for up to 500 QH staff to join HISA. That’s great news for the Society but also for health informatics in Queensland.
- Melbourne’s trams still rock!
If you’re after a more discussion, take a look at the #hic2010 tag on twitter.
Disclaimer: I’m a member of HISA, was on HIC 2010′s Program Committee and work at AEHRC.
