Picture caption: From DALL-E. Image of a piglet joyfully rooting around and discovering computers
David
Thanks for your message! Sounds like you’re interested in medical informatics. Sounds like you have been thinking about the Electronic Health record and have ideas on how to make things better.
As for learning more about informatics, it depends on what your purpose is.
If you want to read about organizational change, a crucial element of being an effective physician/APP informaticist, read my blog post on books. (see post)
If you want to participate and learn more about informatics generally, if you are junior faculty or physician / provider trainee, consider:
- Clinical Informatics Board Certification via ABPM
- Attend one of the many National meetings:
- Fall AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association), Spring CIC (clinical informatics conference). This is perhaps the most useful meeting for a physician/APP looking to find like-minded colleagues, especially the practical Spring conference.
- Epic UGM/XGM or corresponding EHR national meeting. UGM User Group meeting is a massive 12,000 attendee event: the Epic campus is not to be missed. XGM the eXpert Group Meeting is smaller (5000?) and it is a little easier to connect with people there.
- HIMSS national meeting. A bit overwhelming, 30,000 attendees (or more) and heavily vendor-focused. All the big players, as well as most of the industry, are here, and if you’re looking to compare vendors, this is a great place. Not as many clinicians attend.
- Regional/state chapters of HIMSS (for example Colorado HIMSS). Regional chapters are a great place to meet local colleagues in IT and informatics. I very much enjoy our Colorado chapter, and we will be hosting RESCUE OCTOBER (Regional EHR Seminars – Colorado Usergroup Epic – October). Yes a tortured acronym, but I bet you’ll remember us!
- CHIME (Healthcare CIO’s mostly but a growing number of CMIOs)
- CXO or informatics Leadership Academies / Bootcamps (CHIME, others)
- AMDIS (mostly California health systems attending)
- Blogs (Kevin Pho at KevinMD, Craig Joseph at Nordic, Bryan Vartebedian at 33charts, also me)
- Books (see above)
- Find a mentor (Epic’s PACmentor community, CHIME, AMIA meetings). Note that with broad adoption of Zoom and Teams video calls, it is much easier to seek mentors at a national scale than just meeting someone geographically local.
Are you interested in reading journal articles and the state of the art? Perhaps even write an article?
1. JAMIA.org Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association if you are an academic and want to see where the research and clinical work is going.
2. JMIR Journal of Medical Internet Research is a terrific high impact journal with tons of great research and more practical articles in informatics.
3. If you use a major EHR, see if you join the userweb for that company. For example userweb.epic.com is free registration for all hospital based and clinic based physicians using Epic. The Forum there is a terrific way to interact with an international community of physicians, analysts, nurses all using Epic and collaborating on current problems and topics.
4. Self serving: my blog at https://ctlin.blog where I post weekly on informatics topics.
Hope this is a good start for you. Happy exploring!
CT Lin MD
