Medical informatics in dermatology course (NY)

September 23, 2014 | by

Thursday 13 November (all day), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller Research Laboratories Auditorium, New York City

‘Envisioning the Future of Dermatology Through the Lens of Medical Informatics’  will enable the clinician to better understand:

  • the novel approaches to diagnose skin cancers with computer informatics
  • the benefits, limitations and integration of photography and electronic medical record in dermatology
  • the benefits, limitations and legal barriers in teledermatology
  • the factors related to privacy issues for images

6.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits. Early registration savings before 1 October: $50 MDs, PhDs and DOs; $25 Fellows, Residents, and RNs. After 1 October add $25. More information and registration. Hat tip to Peter Brodhead of MSKCC and Howard Reis of HealthePractices.

65 years of health informatics

May 6, 2014 | by

The surprising fact is that healthcare informatics, so associated with IT and computers, started well before computers in wide use*–65 years ago by Germany’s Dr. Gustav Wagner, founder of the German Society for Medical Documentation, Computer Science and Statistics which continues today as the GMDS. This infographic published in HealthWorks Collective presents other milestones on the timeline such as the influential paper published in 1959 by Ledney and Lusted on the use of computers in medical diagnosis and therapy. Unfortunately the UK and European advances of the period and forward are passed by in the graphic’s US focus. To fill in the historical gaps: Vanderbilt University Department of Biomedical Informatics backgrounder, Health Informatics/Wikipedia  Hat tip to reader William T. Oravecz of Saint Francis Care, Connecticut.

*Computers were developed for WWII war work: codebreaking Colossus [UK, which broke the German High Command’s codes on the Lorenz SZ-40] and the ENIAC [US Army 1946, for ballistic computation!]