Medicine 2.0 Congress in Toronto, Sept. 2008

The Medicine 2.0 Congress will take place in Toronto, Canada on September 4-5th, 2008. This is an international conference, with the focus on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine; it is organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the International Medical Informatics Association, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CHIRAD, and a number of other sponsoring organizations.

The Call for Abstracts is now open for abstracts, speaker and panel proposals - go to http://www.medicine20congress.com and pre-register. The conference invites academic and international contributions, and also covers areas such as Science 2.0, Peer-Review 2.0, and social networking for consumers AND health professionals. See the topic list at the CALL FOR ABSTRACTS http://www.medicine20congress.com/ocs/callforpapers.php

Deadline for abstracts is May 2, 2008. Among possible topics to address are:

• Building virtual communities and social networking applications for
• health professionals, patients and consumers;
• Collaborative biomedical research, academic / scholarly communication,
• publishing and peer review;
• Consumer empowerment, patient-physician relationship, and
• sociotechnical issues;
• Ethical & legal issues, confidentiality and privacy;
• Personal health records and Patient portals;
• Public (e-)health, population health technologies, surveillance;
• Search, Collaborative Filtering and Recommender Technologies;
• Semantic Web ("Web 3.0") applications;
• The nature and dynamics of social networks in health;
• Usability and human factors on the web;
• Virtual (3D) environments, Second Life;
• Web 2.0 approaches for clinical practice, clinical research, quality
• monitoring;
• Web2.0-based medical education and learning;
• and much more.

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Help needed classifying keywords for IMIA

Prof Graham Wright is looking for help classifying keywords in the emerging Knowledge Base for the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

Background
Building on, in part, the Otley outputs, a second phase of work is being jointly funded by IMIA and BCSHIF to develop the knowledge core for IMIA, and the wider international health informatics community.

Phase 2 methods and pilot results

In Phase 1, the Otley workshop, a group of health informatics experts was asked to identify the elements of the discipline of health informatics. For Phase 2, the published and peer-reviewed literature is taken to be a valid proxy for such expertise. A literature analysis examining the emerging themes and high level descriptors is being undertaken, using document and discourse analysis software and methods. This is based in an analysis of available electronic literature, and will additionally use established and novel indexing and analysis techniques. The method is acknowledged to be similar to that used by Lorenzi to develop the original IMIA Scientific Map, but makes use of materials and methods not available at that time.

Use of keywords in many publications depends on author selection as opposed to a consistent approach, and is causing some issues in indexing, and different 'in vogue' terms in different places and times seem to be skewing some of the results of the literature searches. All of these issues are important factors that we will be analysing as the current research phase unfolds. A search of Pubmed using Reference Manager 11 using a set of search criteria Included:-
Health Informatics
Medical Informatics
Clinical Informatics
Nursing Informatics
Pharmacy Informatics
Dental Informatics

But excluded Bioinformatics because of the heavy orientation in the literature to genomics.

The keywords in each article were extracted and transferred to an access database and then an excel spreadsheet.

Some 10,000 different words were produced and these were given to a team of information experts at a workshop in London on the 24th January 2007. The group reduced this list to 444 words that seemed to be associated with the areas of health informatics as opposed to being merely English words and phases used in the articles.

In addition the index of the last five years of the British Journal of Healthcare Computing was used as a pilot and the experts gathered in January produced a second set of themes and elements extending the Otley outputs.

How you can help

If you feel you could help Graham has prepared a spreadsheet which contains the latest version of the emerging Knowledge Base for IMIA. He is looking for volunteers to spend twenty minutes or so classifying keywords.

Please contact him on profwright@gmail.com and he will send you a copy of the spreadsheet and full instructions.

IMIA Web 2.0 Taskforce set up

IMIA, the International Medical Informatics Association (www.imia.org) has set up a Web 2.0 Exploratory Taskforce. It aims to bring together interested individuals from within and outside IMIA to explore the nature and potential of Web 2.0 applications, aiming at developing background materials and proposing specific lines of action for the IMIA Board and General Assembly.

Or in other words, we want to look at what Web 2.0 is (and beyond to think about 3.0), what it might offer IMIA and the wider health informatics community, how it might affect the future development of the discipline and health more widely, what tools we might use to support IMIA's activities as we develop our e-services - and anything else that seems relevant.

The Taskforce is being co-ordinated (in the first instance) by Peter Murray, IMIA Vice President for Working Groups and Special Interest Groups, and Lincoln A. Moura Jr., IMIA Treasurer. We welcome involvement from anyone with interest in what we are doing - and especially people with expertise in Web 2.0, in particular if they are from Europe and Asia-Pacific areas, as we have few Taskforce members from those areas at the moment. Email pjm.imia[at]gmail.com with what you can contribute to the work.

We have set up a portal with information about the scope of the work, and that will collate information on and links to work as it develops. See http://www.differance-engine.net/imia20/