AMIA 2008 November 09, 2008

After a long while I decided to add some stuff my research blog and AMIA 2008 is a good excuse for that.
AMIA 2008 started with an interesting keynote speech by David M. Eddy. I was expecting more like a high level speech about general benefits informatics and stuff but he talked about more specific issue which is importance of modeling. Actually that make sense given that the main theme was "from foundation to applications to policy". One lesson I got from the lesson was to construct individual guidelines based on modeling for patients.

I think it was useful to see a talk about importance of modeling and I am more motivated now modelign workflow. Dr. Eddy also made a good point by giving the modeling process priority instead of using modeling having another priority.

After the key note I attended the panel about distributed cognition in health care.
I am not sure who was the panel chair but I like his opening slides. He came up with 10 questions that the panelists roughly answer in their presentations.

First speaker who was Brian Hazlehurst mostly provided definitions and textbook info about cognition. I like his presentation of activity system as the unit analysis of distributed cognition.
However, I think cognitive cognition makes a lot of assumption that makes it hard to use at every setting. For example I am not sure all these assumptions are shown to be valid for emergency departments.
He also mentioned about Actor Network Theory as another approach I should definitely consider it in my study.
Oh, I should definitely ask his slides.
The second speaker was Dr. Zhang and I like his idea of collection data of physicians'/nurses' movement in emergency departments by using RFID. This method does not make direct observations useless but is a good complementary.
M. Beuscart-Zephir from EVALAB talked about their work it is good to know another group in France on workflow issue.
Lastly
Dr. Xiao discussed that task analysis can not be done without not knowing tools well.
Also he well answered the question of the difference between usability test and task analysis. Basically, they are overlapping and their focus is different.

After the panel I attended the opening session of innovation center and attended to student working group business meeting. It was nice see old friends (e.g. Muzni, Kevin)and make new friends (e.g. Riva)

After the student meeting 6 of us went to Sette Osteria for pizza cooked in wood fire.