The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) believes that widespread use of information technology in general, and electronic health records (EHRs) in particular, are critical to successful transformation of health care in the United States. Towards that end, AMIA and its partners have been exploring ways to expand understanding about, support for, and use of EHRs through the GotEHR? initiative.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) believes there is an urgent need to formulate a public policy framework regarding secondary use of health data to ensure public trust as the national health information network evolves. Secondary use of health data can enhance health care experiences for individuals, expand knowledge about disease and appropriate treatments, strengthen understanding about the effectiveness and efficiency of our health care systems, support public health and security goals, and aid businesses in meeting the needs of their customers. Yet, access to and secondary use of data poses complex ethical, political, technical, and social challenges.

  

AMIA and AHIMA Align on Public Policy Initiatives

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) announced that a Memorandum of Understanding has been established between them to join forces on a common public policy agenda.

Global Trial Bank (GTB) is being developed by the AMIA to become the world’s peer-reviewed repository of protocols and results from clinical trials of all types. Once established, doctors, nurses, and other health professionals, industry, the public, and scientists will be able to perform powerful search and data exploration on our advanced database without charge, and GTB will become a major global resource for knowledge management in biomedicine.

The International Medical Informatics Association is an independent organization established under Swiss law in 1989. The organization was established in 1967 as Technical Committee 4 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). In 1979, it evolved from a Special Interest Group of IFIP to its current status as a fully independent organization. IMIA continues to maintain its relationship with IFIP as an affiliate organization. IMIA has national members that represent the different countries around the World. AMIA is the official national member of IMIA.

The Alliance for Nursing Informatics is a collaboration of organizations that represent a unified voice for nursing informatics. The Alliance represents more than 3,000 nurses and brings together 20 distinct nursing informatics groups in the United States.

The National Alliance for Primary Care Informatics is an evolving, coordinating group of primary care organizations committed to the development and implementation of a national strategy for the use of information technology and management in primary care.

The Academic Forum is a unit of AMIA that works closely with the proposed Academic Strategic Leadership Council to provide guidance, support, and advocacy for academic programs in biomedical and health informatics in the United States.

The Academic Strategic Leadership Council is a body within the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) created to assure that a leadership base develops within the academic health sciences.

Clinical decision support (CDS) provides clinicians, staff, patients or other individuals with knowledge and person-specific information, intelligently filtered or presented at appropriate times, to enhance health and health care.

This Roadmap recommends a series of activities to improve CDS capabilities and increase use of CDS throughout the United States health sector.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) recently convened a Terminology and Classification Policy Task Force composed of medical and nursing informaticians, nosologists, and health information managers and educators, well known in the terminology and classification field.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) convened a Task Force to address issues related to work force needs in the era of the electronic health record. AMIA and AHIMA also hosted a work force summit meeting in November 2005.

On June 13th, 2007 AMIA convened an invitational workshop on Pharmacovigilance. The meeting included presentations about key drug safety and pharmacovigilance initiatives. AMIA worked closely with the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and Health Level Seven (HL7) and several major pharmaceutical companies to plan the meeting.