Chris Hogan wrote:
I am up at the GP & PHC Conference where naturally the topic turned to
Health Informatics.
Yes, informatics and Australia's slow progress in improving electronic
management of clinical information kept coming up in many of the 236
papers and posters, and plenary sessions and workshops. Despite this,
the Conference had no specific sessions on informatics other than a
fascinating workshop run by Prof. Teng Liaw and his colleague in
Shepparton Dr. Douglas Boyle, a Scottish computer scientist who set up a
very powerful nationwide diabetes database in Scotland, which enables
users to look at all of the diabetes-related information of every
diabetic in Scotland. Douglas showed us some of what is available in
that system and it is mind-blowing. Doug's details are at:
http://www.findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/researcher/person142641.html
The actual purpose of the workshop was to do some research! A table of
GPs, another of allied health professionals, another of health service
managers and a fourth one of researchers (acknowledging that some people
had multiple roles) independently wrote down what kind of information
about patients should be shared in order to facilitate and maximise the
person's long term health care. There was a structured voting process
(the exercise apparently used something called the nominal group
technique) and then the results were collated by Teng Liaw working hard
at his laptop machine in real time. What came out was that the
different professional groups had quite different ideas about the
information that they thought should be shared, but it turned out that
each group called the same types of information by different names, so
some of the differences did not really exist. I understand that Teng
and Doug will be publishing the results.
Apart from my paper about GPs' experiences of receiving opportunistic
reminders for preventive activities, the only other informatics-specific
presentation that I was able to attend was a very interesting and
challenging paper that compared the quality of care with and without
computers and found no obvious difference. The abstract is at:
http://www.phcris.org.au/elib/render.php?params=3700
and the slides of all the presentations will be on the Conference Web
site http://www.phcris.org.au/conference/2007 within a few days.
I have suggested to PHCRIS who run the GP&PHC conferences that in view
of the vital role of informatics in health care they should actively
seek to invite and involve people working in health informatics to
attend next year (it will be in Hobart early in June 2008) and that they
make informatics one of the themes of that Conference.
--
Oliver Frank, general practitioner
255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens, South Australia 5086
Phone 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 Mobile 0407 181 683
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