TK3: The Third Degree

This week  @ work I’ve had the opportunity to get acquainted with the iPad.  I have to say it is a highly interesting device and I do like it.  However,  when the day comes for me to purchase something for my personal use, I think I’ll have to hold out for the Google version.  :-)

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days furiously reading about the iPad and researching it’s applications for medicine.   Imagine, an iPad EMR — there’s a lot of good potential here!

In other news:

• On Monday, I’m off to Denver for the NLM Informatics Training Conference.  I am there to represent our research team and present our study which I previously presented on campus back in March.
• This week a Health 2.0 conference was held in DC and I actively followed the Twitter thread — spent way too much time!

Last month, I made a quick trip to Washington D.C. to present at a symposium for the annual Medical Library Association Annual Meeting.  I presented on behalf of our Knowledge Management team at the symposium – E-patients: The Techno Cultural Revolution of Health Consumers.

During the presentation I shared our team’s work integrating health information into our institution’s patient web portal, MyHealthAtVanderbilt.  Other presenters discussed their institutional collaborations with personal health records and the most moving part of the day were the talks by e-patients and patient advocates e-Patient Dave & Regina Holliday.   Both have experienced our health care system in negative ways and became fully informed patients and advocates for change; their stories are not to be missed and have much to teach us as health information professionals on how we can help create change.

You can view both of their presentations on YouTube:

e-Patient Dave – part 1, part 2, part 3

Regina Holliday – part 1, part 2, part 3

It was a wonderful day overall and I will soon be getting my slides posted to the Symposium Website.

As far as MLA goes, I was only there one day but was truly impressed by the heavy social networking experience.  Between the Twitter stream and the MLA Blog, I felt very informed about conference activities even though I was not present the whole time.  Way to go MLA! I only wish MORE attendees were tweeting!