HIMMS interested in bloggers, blogging, and social networking

Today I spent some time being interviewed by a HIMMS marketing and communications group member and I was pleased by what I heard. The fellow on the phone seem genuinely interested in how we, as bloggers, see HIMMS as an organization and especially how they could better cater the 2007 conference to our small (but in his words “influential”) blogging community. He said HIMMS had been following blogs like mine and are very interested learning if the HIMMS 2007 Conference should have a blog and what it should look like.

Sounds like progress has been made on at least one of the myriad number of standards catalog efforts out there: an ANSI Panel Recommends Initial Standards to Support Nationwide Health Information Network. Here’s what the announcement said: Initial work has focused on the areas of biosurveillance, consumer empowerment, and electronic healthcare records – the three initial use cases identified by the American Health Information Community (AHIC). The ninety standards delivered today were identified by the Panel as being relevant and suitable for further consideration.

A reader recently introduced me to this stpBA Storyboarding tool and I must say I’m impressed by the simplicity, low learning curve, and automated generation of important artifacts like requirements documentation, traceability, test scripts, and GUI screen flows. Using the stpBA tool mere mortals and teams without dozens of business analysts can actually do the right thing and improve their specifications phases without creating days worth of useless documentation activity. It’s definitely worth checking out.

I took down lots of notes about my next two days in India but didn’t have a chance to blog due to time and some connectivity issues. So, it’s a week late but I’m sure it’ll be worth reading. Days 3 and 4 were spent doing “deep dives” into architecture, design approaches, and potential implementation approaches. Having worked with offshore firms for many years, it’s clear that they think a bit differently but how does that translate into practical and deliverable work?

My second day in India (the first full day that I wasn’t half asleep) went well. I had to drive from my hotel in Old Bombay to the outsourcer’s office to New Bombay, which couldn’t have been more than 15-20 miles away but took 90 minutes to get there due to traffic. And the driver said that the traffic was good. And, the monsoon season hasn’t kicked in yet. Yikes!

As some of you already know, I’m in Mumbai and Bangalore, India this week working with a couple of outsourcing firms on clinical IT projects. I’ve been working with outsourcers in places like Pakistan, Russia, and India for almost a decade and it’s going to be great to get out to India to see how “offshoring” works first-hand instead of across thousands of miles. I can’t say I enjoyed my visit to my travel nurse before the trip.

I ran across this interesting link at Microsoft Research: 2020 Science. From the website: In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years. The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences.

I was recently introduced to Dr. Stephen Beller and Mr. Sabatini Monatesi’s work at the WellnessWiki. I really liked what they were doing there so I asked them to write up an article on “The Healthcare IT Gap” to help us get their perspective on why existing HIT systems may not be enough to automate and improve healthcare. Steve is a licensed clinical psychologist with heavy expertise in software and has been working in the health informatics field since 1981.

I recently attended our local Health TechNet meeting, run by David Main in Virginia, where Dr. Joseph Bormel of QuadraMed presented his thoughts on Evidence-based Medicine. I found the talk englighting but the conversation in the meeting (where there were nurses, physicians, and other practitioners present) even more enlightening. My pet peeve about evidence-based medicine is that most of us concentrate on the reasons why it’s hard and how we can’t get consensus on many important decisions (which is true).

The organizers of Games For Health asked me to announce their Games for Health Day event. I didn’t know much about it before but I find the ideas fascinating. Here’s how they describe the event: This one-day event, just before the opening of the Electronic Entertainment Expo will bring together researchers, game developers, and health & healthcare professionals for a series of talks devoted to how games and game technologies are addressing critical health & healthcare issues.

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