President's Stimulus Law Provides Funds for Informatics Initiatives

President Obama's economic stimulus package includes $17 billion in Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments to health care providers who demonstrate "meaningful use" of healthcare IT in their practices. For now, there is still some debate over what "meaningful use" means. Check out the transcript of a recent hearing sponsored by the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics for a discussion on what "meaningful use" should include.

Another outcome of the stimulus package is the creation of two advisory committees - the Health IT Policy Committee and the Health IT Standards Committee. These committees were established to make policy recommendations for an interoperable health IT system to David Blumenthal, National Coordinator For Health IT.

Google Health Continues to Fix Bugs in Its PHR

In a recent post on the Official Google Blog, Roni Zeiger, MD, Product Manager of Google Health discussed a common error that people encounter when downloading data from their medical record into their Google Health Account. The confusion occurs when hospitals use ICD-9 codes that may not be an accurate description of the patient's diagnosis. Read more here about how Google Health is working to correct this error.

Medical Informatics - Continuing Education

There are numerous educational options in informatics. They range from in-person courses from the Medical Library Association and the week-long intensive Woods Hole BioMedical Informatics course to online courses through the American Medical Informatics Association’s 10X10 program. Below is a brief list of informatics classes, tutorials and distance learning opportunities.

Medical Library Association:

Informatics courses currently listed in the Medical Library Association Continuing Education Clearinghouse on Informatics are:

Bioinformatics Primer

Clinical Genomics: From Bench to Bedside

Incorporating Informatics into the Curriculum

Informatics and EHR: Envisioning the Future

Information Insecurities: How Secure is Secure Enough?

Making Sense of Protein Sequences

Woods Hole:
BioMedical Informatics Course Overview (Woods Hole)
These week-long survey courses are designed to familiarize individuals with the application of information science and computer technologies in health care, biomedical research, and health professions education. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on computer exercises, participants will be introduced to the conceptual and technical components of medical informatics.

AMIA 10 X 10 Program

The AMIA 10x10 uses curricular content from existing informatics training programs and other AMIA educational initiatives with a special emphasis toward programs with a proven track record in distance learning. The content will provide a framework but also cover plenty of detail, especially in areas such as electronic and personal health records, health information exchange, standards and terminology, and health care quality and error prevention.

Courses available from:

Oregon Health & Science University – Registration to open July 2009

Stanford University

University of Alabama at Birmingham – Registration to open June 2009

University of Cincinnati

University of Illinois at Chicago

University of Minnesota School of Nursing – Registration to open June 2009

NOVA Southeastern University

University of West Florida

A short course in informatics is available from the University of West Florida

Introduction to Medical Informatics

An overview of the interdisciplinary nature of Medical Informatics that should be of interest to physicians, nurses, health care administrators, medical librarians, IT techs and others. To meet your scheduling needs, this course is taught completely online, with an emphasis on the real world interaction between medicine and technology and not on theory. Every effort is made to provide practical and up-to-date examples of issues and interesting emerging technologies for the student.

NCBI Education

Online tutorials available on:

BLAST QuickStart: Example-Driven Web-Based BLAST Tutorial

PSI-Blast Tutorial

Identification of Disease Genes: Example-Driven Web-Based Tutorial

Opportunities for Training and Education Sponsored by the National Library of Medicine

MIS Blog Guidelines

Scope of MIS Blog
Primarily, topics should be related to the field of medical informatics, especially the role of librarians in this field. Topics can include new articles, relevant legislation, new research, and upcoming conference and educational opportunities. The goal of the blog is to provide a forum for discussion and sharing developments in the field.

Posting to the MIS Blog
All MIS officers may post directly to the blog, and will have Blogger “Author” privileges. This means that they can create and edit their own posts. The blog editor (the one person with “admin” access to Blogger) will be able to write blog posts, moderate comments, and edit or delete other blog posts and comments. The editor may gather a group of interested MIS members to act as frequent blog posters. These blog posters will have Blogger “author” privileges, allowing publishing and editing of their own posts. Any MIS member may submit a piece to the blog editor to be posted, if the item falls within the scope of the blog it will be posted.

Commenting on MIS Blog posts
Anyone may post a comment on any MIS Blog post. Anonymous comments are not permitted. The comments will be moderated simply to avoid spam, not to edit content. If comments become dramatically off-topic, the blog editor will privately inform the commenter of the scope of the blog. Inappropriate comments will be removed immediately.
Both blog posts and comments should follow the MLA Task Force on Social Networking Software Guidelines for Bloggers: http://sns.mlanet.org/blog/blog_guidelines.php

MIS Blog Editor
The blog editor is responsible for installing and maintaining the blog software, along with monitoring posts and comments.