President's column: reflections on AMIA's past 3 years

AMIA has been the home for informatics professionals for 22 years, and has undergone a remarkable evolution during that time. Its autumn meeting continues to be a vibrant setting for the best in informatics science and practice, building on a tradition that started with SCAMC (the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care) in 1977. Its journal, created in the early 1990s, is now arguably the preeminent journal in our discipline, combining cutting-edge science with important insights from the practice community. I have been honored to serve as AMIA's President during the past 3 of those 22 years and would like to take a moment to reflect on our recent accomplishments while acknowledging our ongoing challenges and exciting opportunities for the future. Among our recent accomplishments:

• We completed the roll-out of our rebranding effort with a new logo and a web site that has greatly increased functionality, a modern look, and is supporting ongoing efforts to enhance usability and the linkages to our membership database. Special attention to the membership site has made it intuitive and much easier to navigate for those who wish to join or renew membership. Although the new site was developed by an external public relations firm, we have smoothly assumed all responsibility for its maintenance and our web master has been enhancing the site rapidly based on both feedback and new requirements identified by staff and members.

• We have implemented and will soon broadly release our social/community web capability (Socious), which is tied to our member database and allows existing groups and committees to utilize modern methods for communication and document exchange. Socious also supports the spontaneous development of interest groups among members and we will be rolling out its full capabilities through a publicity effort in the next few months.

• Thanks to our relationship with the AMIA-TV production group (which produces videos for the Annual Symposium), we have enhanced our video offerings on our web site and in our e-News. There is also now an AMIA channel on YouTube, and we are retrieving from archive and releasing older video materials, such as the full collection of Collen Award DVDs and nursing informatics oral history tapes.

• Our proceedings archive is now available, with member and registrant access provided for all meeting proceedings going back more than a decade.

• We moved into new offices in Bethesda in late June, leaving behind the building in which AMIA had been located since its inception. The new space is superb and provides us with room to expand.

• Our corporate relations program has thrived, with a doubling in membership revenues due to both new members and increased levels of participation by renewing members. Equally important, we are building strong relationships with companies, with greater industry understanding of the value of their AMIA membership. We have learned to articulate better both the value of AMIA to our corporate members and what distinguishes us from other organizations in the field. Our corporate members are engaged and participating as they never have before and they are looking for collaborative opportunities.

• We have worked to improve our communication with members, both through the weekly e-News mailings (which are more professionally designed than in the past) and through these columns that have appeared at the end of each issue of J Am Med Inform Assoc since January 2011. We also introduced an Annual Symposium newsletter to help promote the annual event during the months leading up to the meeting.

• AMIA's Academic Forum has grown rapidly in membership, partly in response to the formalization of its rules of governance and the assumption of leadership roles by elected members. Forum members have assumed responsibility for planning their own annual meetings and have established task forces that are addressing important educational and certification/accreditation issues that are related to the clinical informatics subspecialty developments.

• We have totally revamped our corporate bylaws in response to evolving requirements of the organization and modified in response to the Board's strategic realignment efforts over the past 2 years. Our committee structure has accordingly been totally redesigned and there are now new and more meaningful opportunities for member involvement in the organization.

• With the help of a board-appointed task force, we rewrote, promulgated, and implemented new Conflict of Interest policies, placing pertinent information about individual potential conflicts in the members' section of our web site. The Ethics Committee has also updated our Ethics Guidelines and these were approved by the Board and will soon be published in J Am Med Inform Assoc.

• Our international programs have been redesigned and rationalized, driven in part by the recognition that our international efforts were fragmented and lacked a cohesive oversight process. The Global Health Informatics Partnership (GHIP, pronounced Gee-HIP) successfully completed its two grant-funded efforts (with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from the Rockefeller Foundation), having engaged international colleagues in planning for education and workforce development in resource-constrained environments. The Health Informatics Building Blocks (HIBBs) concept was embraced by OER Africa and the first several HIBBs are available for free access from http://www.oerafrica.org/hibbs/HIBBsHomePage/tabid/1568/Default.aspx. With the end of grant funding, GHIP has been integrated more logically with our other global informatics activities, including our relationship with the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). With new International Affairs Committee leadership in place and growing foreign recognition of AMIA's interest in and support for global programs and collaboration, the GHIP name will continue to be utilized as the AMIA label for its global programs and relationships.

• We successfully attracted a conference grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that supported our novel and well received Public Health Informatics 2011 meeting in Orlando. We have decided, however, to simplify our meeting offerings by eliminating the annual Spring Congress and to focus instead on our growing Joint Summits event in San Francisco each March and the thriving Annual Symposium every autumn. In 2012, however, we will still have a spring event due to our sponsorship of the Nursing Informatics 2012 (NI2012) meeting in Montreal, which is an important additional undertaking that has demonstrated our ability to host major international events, even when they are held outside the USA.

• The ‘Sharing Our Knowledge’ task force has made important recommendations that are already being carefully considered in the planning for AMIA 2012. Based in part on their preliminary presentation in Orlando in May, we implemented on short notice a few changes for AMIA 2011 in October, such as the satellite Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) that was held on the Saturday before our conference.

• We have pursued closer collaborative ties with several other organizations this past year, believing that this is a key method for decreasing competition and serving our members more effectively. The ACM SIGCHI session is one example, as is our co-sponsorship of an IEEE informatics meeting held in San Jose in July. The ACM has become sufficiently interested in forging a close relationship with AMIA that we have established a joint liaison committee that is pursuing opportunities for collaboration. We expect recommendations from them in 2012.

• AMIA has also strengthened its relationship with the Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS), assisting with scientific sessions for their members on health information technology (HIT) topics and studying and eventually supporting their Code of Ethics for Interaction with Companies. Similar ongoing discussions with the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) have resulted in a joint summary of the relationship between the two organizations and the role of informatics in their activities. That summary is complete and is posted on both the AMIA and AHIMA web sites.

• The clinical informatics subspecialty was approved by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and AMIA forwarded the names of 12 self-nominated members as candidates to serve on the newly formed question committee that will be developing the certifying board examination. In addition, AMIA is aggressively pursuing the creation of board review course offerings, both online and face to face, and has established a special task force to guide staff in the creation, roll-out, and pricing of such programs.

• Our policy work continues to enhance our visibility and influence. Our formal submission of comments on proposed legislation, standards, and rule-making has continued apace, and we had another successful Hill Day in April. The invitational policy meeting in December was enthusiastically received by attendees, and we continue to have successfully published the policy papers based on prior year meetings. Our involvement with the National Quality Forum (NQF) continues to be vibrant, and AMIA was re-elected to membership in the National Priorities Partnership (which NQF runs under a contract from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)). We are frequently contacted by members of the press who seek our input on stories they are writing, and references to AMIA in news articles have reached an all-time high. In short, we are increasingly recognized as the home for informatics thought leaders and respected for our objectivity and focus on a safe and effective healthcare system.

It should be clear that AMIA is healthy and effective, maintaining our core values while seeking new ways to deliver value to members and to the field. We face ongoing fiscal challenges, given the current economy, and are aware that we need to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse set of interests reflected in our membership.

AMIA is especially grateful for the time, expertise, and commitment that its members have offered to our organization. AMIA could not flourish without the volunteerism that we have been fortunate to attract, and your efforts bring us excellence, credibility, and ongoing growth and influence. Our sincere thanks to all of you, and especially to those who are playing key leadership roles on our Board and on committees and task forces.

Although I am moving on from my full-time AMIA position, I will remain engaged in both the field and the organization. As I pursue new interests, I plan to have ongoing opportunities to interact with the many AMIA members and leaders with whom I have had the privilege to serve these past 3 years. My personal thanks to you all.