The CCTS and UAB Informatics Institute will present at the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium, taking place in New Orleans November 11-15.

The theme of the AMIA 2023 Annual Symposium is "Transforming Healthcare and Biomedicine for a Sustainable Future." This symposium aims to address the significant challenges faced by healthcare and biomedicine, such as staffing, knowledge translation, finances, and supply chain.

In light of these challenges, there is a growing need for innovations in informatics that not only transform the field but also ensure sustainability.

Informaticians play a crucial role in driving change and must ensure their work contributes to an equitable and sustainable future. The symposium offers an opportunity to network with industry leaders, colleagues, and students, take advantage of career development opportunities, find mentors, and expand knowledge through various sessions and publications.

Biomedical and Health Informatics Year in Review
James Cimino, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham Informatics Institute School of Medicine

Keeping up with the literature in biomedical and health informatics is an essential professional endeavor – but one that is daunting, given the exponential proliferation of peer-reviewed publications in the field. We can help by providing a sampler of papers that AMIA Working Groups find significant. Presented in rapid fire, entertaining style, the AMIA "Informatics Year in Review" session at the Annual Symposium is consistently one of the most highly attended sessions on the agenda and one that attendees find a valuable supplement to their own readings.

Undergraduate Health Informatics Accreditation: Benefits, Timeline, Pathways, and Milestones
Sue Feldman, RN, M.Ed., Ph.D., FACMI, University of Alabama at Birmingham 

Will AI Make Terminology Irrelevant?
James Cimino, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham Informatics Institute School of Medicine 

Controlled terminologies have a long history of use in medicine. In the modern age, concept-based controlled terminologies have been the standard by which we have recorded, and dealt with, health data, especially in electronic records. For the literature, and some data repositories, the driver for the use of controlled terminologies was the need for better recall and more precise retrieval. Increasing computer power and storage have now led to remarkable improvements in NLP (Natural Language Processing). With the subsequent availability of huge amounts of data, especially text, the power of Deep Learning has enabled artifacts such as the generative text app ChatGPT. Have these and related developments obviated the need for controlled terminologies? Has the role of coding changed, and will it change going forward? What will be the role, if any, of terminology in 5 years? Will our ability to use terminology atrophy?

DiffusionCT: Latent Diffusion Model for CT Image Standardization
Jin Chen, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Development of a Multi-variate Time Series Data Set for Reportable Cancer Recurrence (MVTS-CanRecur)
John Osborne, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Developing a Model for Inclusive Excellence in Higher Education
Leandra Celaya, MSc, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Semantically oriented EHR navigation with a patient specific knowledge base and a clinical context ontology.
Tiago Colicchio, PhD, MBA, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Towards Identification of Delirium in Clinical Text
John Osborne, PhD, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Should Generative Artificial Intelligence Be Used for Patient Care?
James Cimino, MD, University of Alabama at Birmingham Informatics Institute School of Medicine

Leveraging A Clinical Dashboard and Process Mappings to Improve Treatment Access and Outcomes for Women Veterans with Urinary Incontinence
Kayla Reinicke, CRNP, MSN, WHNP-BC, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Extending the EHR to support clinical and research use of Social Drivers of Health (SDoH) data
Rena Patel, MD, MPH, University of Alabama Birmingham

There is increasing recognition of the vital importance of social drivers of health (SDoH) in order to better understand and improve health and healthcare. However, assessment of SDoH at the individual-level has been inconsistent, data are not standardized, and social-environmental data linked to the places patients live are rarely integrated with their clinical data to support clinical decision-making or research. In this panel, collaborators from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) will present examples from their work within N3C as well as from their academic institutions to provide real-world examples of ongoing work that seeks to improve collection, interoperability, analysis, visualization, and community engagement for SDoH research in big data.

Written by Robert Brown | November 2, 2023