Thoughts from AMIA

Dialing in from AMIA, I thought it'd be important to capture random thoughts and specific feedback from the conference.

1. The AMIA community seems to have embraced the public health community with great enthusiasm. All of the sessions were well attended by members from across all sectors -- clinical informatics, vendors, academia, international stakeholders, and consultants.

2. The PH Research Grid session was a very strong session, with lots of great interaction from the audience. With the COE's sharing their experiences and findings, they were able to give their honest appraisal of the grid approach, and while there are many, many kinks to work out, it seems there is strong agreement of the movement toward standard services is the way to go. Now if we get real crazy, stringing together a couple of services to show this would be a great next step.

3. Dr. Lenert was able to successfully demonstrate PH-DGINet, which helped the audience of his session appreciate some of the simple use cases we are aiming to satisfy (i.e. summary counts).

4. In the longer term, there is some potential to collaborate on the Clinical Decision Support work being led by Nedra Garrett. First, in using the NCPHI lab infrastructure, second, in publishing some alerting services to interface with clinical EMR vendors, HIE's, and other agencies. Still just an idea at this point, but something to explore.

5. Two pragmatic questions continue to raise themselves. Specifically:

What value to state and locals derive from 'the grid'?
Is syndromic surveillance valuable enough to foster adoption?

Thoughts?