Leading the way in informatics

Two organizations and six individuals are winners of the 2011 awards for outstanding achievement in applied medical informatics from the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems.

This latest group—the 12th annual—of AMDIS award winners continues to represent a heightened level of achievement and complexity in the use of health information technology, according to AMDIS President Dr. William Bria, corporate director for medical informatics at the Tampa, Fla.-based Shriners Hospitals for Children system.

“This is so wonderful, the maturation of this entire field,” Bria says. “We've gotten over the adoption part. It's gone from, ‘We've installed it and we're still standing,' to ‘This is actually delivering upon what we've been hoping for, for 25 to 30 years.' ”

But Bria cautions that these winners still represent the few on the leading edge of health IT that are able to leverage their previous investments and turn the technology from mere data collection and retrieval to specific clinical problem-solving.

“It's actually now going through a much more mature phase and what subjects you can focus on and using your data tools to get answers,” Bria says. “It's now being bent to clinical use. I love it.” But it will take “another 10 years” for the rest of the healthcare industry to catch up to these IT leaders, Bria says. The awards will be presented at the 20th annual AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection Symposium this week in Ojai, Calif.