Meeting Features and Tracks
The 2007 AMIA Spring Congress features five distinct
tracks. Each track will be a thematically designed
meeting within the Spring Congress. Attendees can
choose to follow a theme throughout a given track or
move between tracks to tailor their Spring Congress
learning experience. Panel, presentation proposals,
and poster submissions are encouraged.
Clinical Decision Support
The goal of clinical decision support (CDS) is to ensure
that optimal, usable, and effective clinical knowledge is
widely available to health care providers, patients, and
individuals where and when they need it to make high quality,
cost-effective health care decisions. The study
of CDS encompasses a variety of tools and interventions
such as computerized alerts and reminders, clinical
guidelines, order sets, patient data reports and quality
dashboards, documentation templates, diagnostic
support, and clinical workflow tools. Achieving
desirable levels of patient safety, care quality, patient
centeredness, and cost-effectiveness requires that
the health system optimize its performance through
consistent, systematic, and comprehensive application
of available health-related knowledge – that is, through
appropriate use of CDS.
Go to the Clinical Decision Support Track
Nursing Informatics
Nursing informatics is a field in which information
processes and tools are used to improve health care
decision-making, communication, and delivery,
and to facilitate the unique contribution of nurses
across the care continuum. The American Nurses
Association defines nursing informatics as 'a specialty
that integrates nursing science, computer science, and
information science to manage and communicate
data, information, and knowledge in nursing practice.
Nursing informatics facilitates the integration of
data, information, and knowledge to support patients,
nurses and other providers in their decision-making
in all roles and settings. This support is accomplished
through the use of information structures, information
processes, and information technology' (ANA, 2001).
Nurse informaticians actively participate in all levels
of health care to leverage health care technology and
informatics processes to support the health of people
worldwide.
Go to the Nursing Informatics Track
Personal Health Records
Personal Health Records (PHRs) have recently been
proclaimed “the hottest thing in HIT right now.” This
track will focus on the Personal Health Record, with
experts discussing the role of the fi rst generation of
PHR in the broader scheme of electronic health record
systems, what it looks like now, and what future PHR
might be if conceptualized as part of an individual's
personal health system and how it will interact in a
fully-functioning interoperable health system.
Go to the Personal Health Records Track
Public Health Informatics
Public health informatics, and its corollary, population
informatics, is concerned with communications and
information technology that focuses upon groups
rather than individuals. This parallels the field of
public health. Public health is potentially extremely
broad and might even reflect an interest in information
technology with regard to ecology, architecture,
climate, agriculture, and such. AMIA will focus on
those aspects of public health that are considered to
be in the purview of the Centers for Disease Control
including security with respect to biosurveillance and
bioterrorism. At this time it does not concern itself
with IT for the broadest reaches of public health.
Go to the Public Health Informatics Track
Translational Research Informatics
This track will address the various topics about
informatics support to translational biomedical
research, including both aspects of the translation
such as applying discoveries generated during
research in the laboratory and in preclinical studies
to the development of trials and studies in humans,
and enhancing the adoption of best practices in
the community. It spans over the entire spectrum
of research from the molecular level to the human
population, emphasizing the critical role of informatics
in facilitating and optimizing dissemination of
biomedical knowledge to biomedical scientists,
clinicians, and patients.
Go to the Translational Research Informatics Track
Meetings & Education
