The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) held its annual symposium in Chicago, IL, from November 12 through 16, 2016. Attended by more than 2500 participants, the annual symposium is the largest educational event AMIA sponsors. This 5-day conference features preconference workshops, special interest working group meetings, educational sessions, policy updates, poster presentations, extensive networking opportunities, and engagement with academic organizations and vendors. Congruent with AMIA's mission to "improve health through informatics education, science, and practice," the international and interdisciplinary nature of the organization was evident in the diversity of presentations and attendees. In the following sections, I share honors earned by colleagues and a few examples of the work informatics nurses lead and collaborate to produce.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: NURSE LEADER OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, newly appointed Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the first nurse to lead the organization, provided the keynote address to a standing-room-only audience. Her extensive research develops informatics initiatives that support patient self-management, which include ComputerLink, HeartCare, and Project HealthDesign, and extends engineering discoveries to healthcare environments through novel visualization methods such as Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery's Living Environments Laboratory. Dr Brennan brings more than 30 years of clinical, academic programming, faculty mentoring, research, and leadership expertise to the NLM, an organization of more than 1700 staff members who are the custodians of the largest biomedical knowledge repository, which includes physical books, journals, manuscripts, and media, as well as MEDLINE/PubMed, the Human Genome Project, and http://Clinicaltrials.gov.
During the address, Dr Brennan shared a future vision of the NLM that builds on a long history and tradition of solving information problems. The NLM promotes discovery through services such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which includes data repositories for published literature (eg, PubMed), molecular and clinical data (eg, clinicaltrials.gov), and specific data sets (eg, ClinVar); standards development and application (RxNORM); data management and analysis of biomedical images; and innovative engagement with health consumers, such as the NLM Pill Image Challenge. As data availability increases and data sharing becomes the norm, the NLM is developing services to accept the direct deposit of data used in PubMed Central publications. In the coming years, the NLM will continue to be the "epicenter" for data science discovery, leading the way in best evidence of data curation, management, and advanced analytic methods.
NURSE INFORMATICISTS OUT IN FRONT
Whether as the first author or as members of a team, nurses' scholarly contributions to the symposium covered a wide array of topics of interest to the profession. As an example, several presentations addressed needed improvements in the structure and function of electronic health records. Topics included methods for harmonizing nursing terminologies and classification systems,1 data quality issues for the secondary use of electronic health record data,2,3 establishing information needs among multidisciplinary care teams,4 and improving electronic health record functionality in support of nurse-driven quality activities, such as medication reconciliation.5 Nurses led or participated in the innovative development of information tools for patients including decision support for patients with breast cancer,6 aids for the cognitively impaired,7 and mobile phone-enabled physiologic measurement.8
Conference attendees also received an update from the Nursing and Big Data Working Group 10.9 In this session, members of the working group shared the results of a 2-year effort to evaluate nursing documentation and its impact on nurses. Results indicate a negative impact on nurse satisfaction and documentation time, as well as a general impression that organizational needs take priority in the use and design of existing systems. The panel presented evidence-supported recommendations for EHR design and usability and provided examples of initiatives to improve EHR effectiveness for nurse users.
This year's "Nursing Informatics Working Group Pre-symposia" focused on nursing clinical decision support across settings of care. Led by Maxim Topaz, PhD, RN, MA, and Sarah Collins, PhD, RN, "Designing Next Generation of Clinical Decision Support for Nursing from Hospital to Homecare" provided didactic and hands-on interaction for attendees to explore decision support life cycle principles, assess technology used by nurses across the continuum of care, and apply design and requirement principles to case scenarios for the purposes of improving clinical decision support use.
THREE NURSES RECOGNIZED FOR DISTINGUISHED, SUSTAINED CONTRIBUTIONS
The Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award recognizes a nursing informatics professional for distinguished career achievement and impact on patient care and the nursing discipline. This year's recipient, Patricia C. Dykes, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, joins other esteemed colleagues (Table 1), similarly recognized for pivotal contributions to AMIA and the larger informatics community. Dr Dykes is an associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School and a senior nurse scientist and program director, Nursing Research, Center for Nursing Excellence at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. Her research focuses on informatics innovations that prevent patient harm and promote patient engagement in inpatient settings.
Two members of the nursing informatics community were inducted into the American College of Medical Informatics. Fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics is acknowledgement of significant contributions to the field of informatics. Mollie Cummins, MSN, PhD, RN, FAAN, is an associate professor and associate dean for Research for the PhD Program, College of Nursing; an adjunct associate professor, Biomedical Informatics Research; and a presidential scholar at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on knowledge models for clinical decision support and the development of informatics innovations in poison control. Roy Simpson, DNP, RN, FAAN, is a clinical professor, Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, Emory University, and vice president of Nursing, Cerner Corporation, Kansas City, MO. As a voice of nursing to industry and practice, Dr Simpson was an early pioneer in clinical information processing systems and partner for the development of the Werley and Lang Nursing Minimum Data Set (1982). Dr Simpson was an original author of the American Nurses Association's Nursing Informatics Scope and Standards of Practice and an advocate for specialty certification.
SCHOLARLY CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SYMPOSIUM
Sarah Collins, PhD, RN, is the 2016 recipient of AMIA's Harriet H. Werley Award, which recognizes a symposium scholarly contribution that significantly advances the field of nursing informatics. Dr Collins is a senior clinical and nurse informaticist in clinical informatics, Partners eCare at Partners Healthcare Systems and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital Division of Internal Medicine and Primary Care.
The AMIA Nursing Informatics Working Group awarded Jennifer Browne, MSN, RN, CCRN, the Nursing Informatics Working Group Student Award for her scholarly contribution: "Affirming Proposed Variable Relationship Patterns in a Conceptual Nursing Model by Converting Qualitative Data to Causal Loop Diagrams." Ms Browne is a doctoral student at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio.
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