The dual themes of this Twenty-First Annual Symposium will be The Emergence of ‘Internetable' Health Care and Systems That Really Work. Together, these ideas form an important focus of modern medical informatics.
Health care is a remarkably information intensive activity. The Internet has greatly enhanced global communications capability; the challenge now is to use this capability to invent new methods for maintaining health and combating disease. Organizational Intranets built on the standards of the Internet and protected behind "firewalls" have rapidly become a standard for modern corporate communications, but health care faces special challenges. For if patients are to take more responsibility for their healthcare, they and their care providers need easy access to person-specific records and health information. Telemedicine and telehealth services will need to deliver services to the point of need, which will be where people live and work. Meeting the challenge of providing these services using public data networks, while protecting individuals' privacy and security, is where many of 1997's most creative and intriguing new developments in ‘Internetable' Health Care will occur.
For users to accept innovative new information systems, they must see that the new system is truly better than the method it replaces. Proving that one has truly done something worth doing with information technology generally means that evaluation has been part of a design from its inception, and not an afterthought. In 1997, what makes good scientific evaluation also makes good business sense, for with downward pressure on healthcare costs, only Systems That Really Work will endure.
The 1997 Annual Fall Symposium will feature the best and most provocative new developments in both of these theme areas, and the opportunity to increase your personal informatics skills. There will be a newly-restructured Tutorial program on a wide variety of topics specifically targeted and labelled for Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced. And more than that, it's going to be just plain fun, for whoever talked about ‘all work and no play" wasn't talking about the Opryland Hotel or "Music City", Nashville Tennessee.
