2012 AMIA Conference (on health informatics)

AMIA (the American Medical Informatics Association) held its conference in Chicago in November 2012. It was a large conference attended by both physicians and academics interested in furthering the goals of the US health care legislation. I attended two workshops pertinent to EHR (electronic health record) on quality reporting and measurement. Dr. Bob Dolin, the new Vice Chair of HL7 (Health Level 7 International), the standards body, spoke on the CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) standard. One of the sessions was on the SMART (Substitutable Medical Applications, Reusable Technologies) platform ecosystem. Related free/open source efforts are i2b2 and indivo.  Its goal is to develop a smart phone-like infrastructure for health information technology (HIT). They have a open source working group chaired by Dr. Nachimuthu. I have attended several online conferences since then. FIHR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) seems to be a practical (and freely downloadable) version that reduces the complexity of the object oriented HL7 Version 3.