What is Medical Informatics?
the field that concerns itself with the cognitive, information processing, and communication tasks of medical practice, education and research, including the information science and technology to support these tasks.
Source: Stanford University, R. A. Greenes, and E. H. Shortliffe.Medical Informatics: An Emerging Discipline with Academic and Institutional Perspectives. 1988.
Last night I browsed through the news from my alma mater, Emory University, and ran across a magazine article that made me SO nostalgic! In the article Beyond Books, the author profiles the current Matheson Reading Room situated in the Asa G. Candler building on Emory’s quadrangle. The focus of the article is about how students use the space in the library for studying and learning. Picture below: isn’t it gorgeous?
Picture from Flickr user caribbeanfreephoto
The reason I am so nostalgic is because I used to work in this very room, but at that time, it looked nothing like this 
. During all 4 years of college, from 1993-1997, I worked here in the Reserves department of the Emory Library system. My experiences were so great working in the library (this area as well as stints in the Chemistry Library, the main Library, and Government Documents) that after firmly ruling out medical school as an option after nearly failing Organic Chemistry (bleh), information sciences naturally became my next choice.
When I worked there, the reading room as you see here was only as high as about halfway up the beautiful windows. During a 1950′s renovation, the decision was made to split the room with a floor installation mid-way up, reducing the height to about 12 feet for each level. In 1999, which was two years after I graduated, the space was renovated to restore it back to it’s original configuration. I would love to be able to visit the space now and see all the changes. My last visit to the campus was this summer, but I only drove through to show my family — I’ve not seen the inside of the building since just before they started the renovations. I’ll have to make a point to go in next time I’m in the area.
Been quiet over the past couple weeks as I’ve been busy writing and preparing another presentation. Today, I presented my MPH project to the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Overall I think it went well! This was the second time I’ve presented the project; the first time back in February to the MPH faculty & students.
I am pleased to have completed yet another milestone! Still need to get my act together w/ the regression analysis though
Over the weekend I watched a few videos from TED and particularly liked this one from Eric Topol. Topol is a cardiologist and geneticist with research interests in mobile health initiatives; he’s also the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.
His presentation, The Future of Wireless Medicine, was of immediate interest to me given our class discussion recently on the ways information technology is used in health care (see my previous post). The talk covers various technologies available for monitoring personal health status using wireless capture devices- such as vital signs, fetal signs, sleep patterns, etc. These devices have the capability to project data to your smartphone – imagine a NIKE shoe that uses a sensor in the sole to monitor your physiological data or an iShoe designed to help with falls prevention.
The examples he covers are examples of how we can better capture data in our goal towards truly individualized & personalized medicine. They help bring us one step even closer to using IT to provide a more holistic view of us as patients.
Here are Topol’s list of the Top 10 targets for wireless medicine; each of these health conditions impacts millions.
The talk is interesting and I will be making sure to start tracking more mobile health projects.
