AMIA and JAMIA in the News

Most healthcare industry experts agree that EHRs can be vehicles for gathering immense amounts of data. For healthcare as a whole, that’s good. For clinical care providers themselves, maybe not so much.

An electronic documentation tide is threatening to swamp clinical care providers. Because of their proximity to patients, doctors, nurses, and other clinical care staff are being asked to do something they probably didn’t envision when they decided to join the medical field: collect data for billing, regulatory compliance, and other ancillary purposes.

Once considered an "emerging" specialty, nursing informatics is today one of the most dynamic domains within the discipline of nursing.

At the crossroads of technology and patient care stand the nurses who have chosen nursing informatics (NI) as their specialty.

NI is the specialty that integrates nursing science, computer science and information science to manage and communicate data, information, knowledge and wisdom in nursing practice.

Clinical informatics, the principle of blending health information technology (HIT) with patient care, is going mainstream. The subspecialty, popular in hospitalist circles, is scheduled to offer board certification following its recent approval by the American Board of Medical Specialties. The first examination will be administered by the American Board of Preventative Medicine and could be held as early as fall 2012, with certificates awarded early in 2013.

The AMIA Board would like to acknowledge Ted Shortliffe for his superb service as AMIA President and CEO. Ted took over the leadership of AMIA in 2009. Having Ted at the helm has been truly a gift for AMIA. Ted brought to the role the perspectives of over 4 decades of informatics experience, much of it in leadership positions and spanning research, clinical and administrative activities. Ted was one of the founders of AMIA and he had served in many leadership roles previously at the organization.