From Toronto to New Orleans - Attending the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) Annual Symposium
Early this November, our lab had the opportunity to attend and present at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Symposium. This years conference took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, and attracted clinicians, informaticians, policy makers and researchers across the globe. The focus for this years symposium was quite broad, yet also quite timely; focusing on transforming health and biomedicine for a sustainable future. The panel presentations and poster presentations truly reflected this theme, where presenters discussed novel and innovative approaches aimed at addressing clinician burnout and retention, using health data to predict outcomes or inform clinical decision making, implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning models into clinical care effectively and equitability, and so on.
(Pictured from left to right) Danielle Shin, Iman Kassam, and Ryan Chan.
Members of our lab also had the opportunity to present several posters at the conference.
Danielle Shin, a registered nurse, doctoral student, and research analyst in the lab, presented a poster entitled, “Identifying and adapting interventions to reduce documentation burden and improve nurses efficiency in using EHRs”. This poster presented preliminary findings from a multi-phased project which aims to understand nurses’ experience with the EHR system and generate interventions to improve their experiences and reduce EHR-related documentation burden.
Iman Kassam, a program officer in the lab, presented a poster which described the design and implementation of a text-based program to support clinician well-being at CAMH. The text-based program, BeWell, was deployed at CAMH in May of 2022 and concluded in October 2023. The poster presented preliminary findings from the implementation and evaluation of the BeWell program.
Nelson Shen, a project scientist in the lab, presented a poster entitled “What Canadians Think: Privacy, Trust and the Health Data Ecosystem”. This poster described findings from a survey deployed by Canada Health Infoway which aimed to understand Canadian’s awareness of their digital health privacy rights and their trust in sharing digital PHI with various entities and for various purposes.
For Danielle and Iman, this was their second time attending the AMIA symposium in person. They both had the opportunity to meet and network with new informaticians and reconnect with those they had met at the previous conference. They also attended their very first “Women In AMIA” event, and met women informaticians leading pivotal and innovative work within their respective organizations and beyond. Alongside Ryan Chan, a registered nurse and doctoral student in the lab, Danielle and Iman attended the Nursing Informatics Working Group mixer - connecting with nursing informaticians from New York City, Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Boston.
Furthermore, Danielle and Iman were enthusiastic about continuing conversations with the individuals they met at AMIA post-symposium. The fellows they encountered at AMIA are engaged in a wide spectrum of health informatics research, including using natural language processing (NLP) to mine textual unstructured data from clinical notes. Danielle and Iman are delving deeper into their peers' work, exploring potential collaborations, and exchanging valuable insights gained from their experiences in health informatics. They've also become members of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). This remarkable community serves as a hub for global networking, knowledge sharing, and collaborative initiatives in health informatics. Through IMIA, they aim to expand their professional network, learn about informatics initiatives across the globe, and foster future collaborations in the field.
Written by: Iman Kassam & Danielle Shin
November 2023