Fresh Starts - Health Informatics, Connecting the Dots of Medicine and Data - NYTimes.com
An article in the NY Times describing the split life of a MD/informaticist. This is not an unusual position for many in the field, but I do find it interesting even the Times is publishing articles like this promoting the field like a national call to action. It is true that to really get informatics implemented around the country, it will not take one brilliant invention, but a lot of legwork from people around the country who understand the technical needs of each hospital. This however is not enough, and for this work to be efficient, there must be a national structure in place, with standards in place for information exchange (which exist in the form of HL7 with CDA) but also incorporating into an architecture such as the National Health Information Network.
Fresh Starts - Health Informatics, Connecting the Dots of Medicine and Data - NYTimes.com: “RUSS CUCINA, 37, lives a double life. For two months of the year, he practices internal medicine, treating patients at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. The rest of the year, he helps the hospital develop its electronic medical records and other data systems.
As a medical doctor who also has a master’s degree in biomedical informatics, Dr. Cucina has a foot in both worlds — medicine and technology — and can bridge the sometimes daunting gap between them.
‘I’m the glue between the I.T. enterprise and the clinical leadership,’ said Dr. Cucina, the hospital’s associate medical director of information technology. ‘Because I have the vocabulary of both sides, I can serve as translator between them.’
Such translators, known as ‘health informatics specialists,’ typically have expertise in medical records and claims, clinical care and programming.”