Welcome...

to the AMIA 2000 Spring Congress. The need to improve the quality of health care, prevent errors, translate good science into practice, and make patients and consumers partners in care has never been more pressing. Building on the Institute of Medicine's Special Initiative on Health Care Quality, the American Medical Informatics Association organizes this conference to bring key stakeholders together for an exchange of ideas and to advance our collective understanding of information needs created by health care improvement projects. The content of the Spring Congress will be organized around the following dimensions of quality improvement in health care:

• Preventing health care errors through better patient records, standards, and vocabularies
• Changing clinical practice patterns with computerized decision support
• Health care quality scorecards and population-oriented clinical data processing
• Consumer informatics supporting patients as co-producers of quality

The Spring Congress will promote evidence-based health informatics for quality improvement. The meeting will build not only on presentations by experts, but also on interaction among all participants. There will be ample opportunity to foster discourse among attendees, with breakout discussion sessions designed to exchange ideas, share experiences, and collectively look at the major issues facing health care improvement efforts. Recommendations will be developed for designers of health information systems, accreditors and quality improvement professionals, purchasers of information technologies, and information system vendors. The conference will also put forward a research agenda for the development of computerized health information systems.

–E. ANDREW BALAS, MD, PhD, AMIA 2000 Spring Congress Program Chair