A ground-breaking conference covering various aspects of health informatics, including topics relevant to the current Ebola outbreak, will be held at the University of Southern Indiana from 8 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, January 28, 2015, in Carter Hall in the University Center West. The second annual Health Informatics Tri-State Summit (HITS) will address emerging trends in the use of health information technology in direct patient care, consumer and patient engagement, health information exchange, wearable computing, data analytics and data modeling.
The one-day event will be particularly relevant, to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technologists and others whose scope of practice is related to health informatics, including students, who can attend at a reduced rate.
This year’s keynote speaker is Pat Mastors, known nationally as a leading voice for patient engagement. She is president and co-founder of the Patient Voice Institute, patient co-chair of the National Quality Forum’s Patient and Family Engagement Action Team, advisor to the Partnership for Patients, and author of the critically acclaimed book Design to Survive: 9 Ways an IKEA Approach Can Fix Health Care & Save Lives, which looks at how simplicity, efficiencies and partnership with customers can drive a better healthcare system.
A career news and medical reporter, Mastors focused on patient advocacy following the death of her father from a hospital-acquired infection. She lobbied successfully to pass two Rhode Island patient safety laws and is creator of a unique tool called the “Patient Pod,†designed to empower patients at the bedside with tools of engagement and partnership. In her presentation, Mastors will speak on how human dignity and simplicity are often missing factors in the design of systems and tools for patients. She will explain how better outcomes also depend on patients themselves becoming the “pull-through.â€
The closing keynote speaker, Brian Norris, MBA, RN-BC, FHIMSS, will explore the use of emerging technologies in healthcare and how connectivity can save lives in the fight against global epidemics, such as the current Ebola outbreak. Norris is CEO and co-founder of Social Health Insights LLC in Fishers, Indiana. He also is one of the co-founders of MappyHealth.com, which was developed in response to the “NowTrending2012†application challenge issued in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This contest challenged entrants to create a web-based application that searches open-source Twitter data for health topics and delivers analyses of that data for health departments and other health entities. The MappyHealth app, developed by Norris’ team, was selected the winner out of 33 applicants. MappyHealth mines Twitter data to indicate potential health issues emerging in the population, build a baseline of trend data, engage the public on trending health topics and cross-reference other data sources.
The Health Informatics Tri-State Summit will feature eight other speakers who will cover a variety of topics related to health informatics technology:
Consumer perspective on healthcare
Healthcare social media and professionalism
Managing medications through informatics
Ways to keep you, me and the computer from becoming a crowd
Patient engagement and remote care in the home
The future of healthcare and where technology can take us
Nurses and health facility administrators will receive up to 6.25 contact hours with submission of documentation of sessions attended and completed program evaluation. For more information about continuing education and accreditation, please contact Jennifer Hertel at jshertel@usi.edu.
The registration fee is $125, $100 for HIMSS members and $15 for students, if registering by January 14, 2015.
For more information about registration fees, visit USI.edu/health or call Outreach and Engagement at 812-464-1863 or 1-800-467-8600.
