Conference Report American Medical lnformatics Association (AMIA) L i n d a K. G o o d w i n Duke University Associate Editor for Medical Informatics linda.goodwin@duke.edu The 1999 AMIA annual convention met with a theme of "Transforming Health Care Through Informatics - Cornerstones for a New Information Management Paradigm". The fall AMIA conference remains the world's premier conference on health informatics research, development, and application. Approximately 2000 attended the meeting held in Washington, DC this past November 6-10, 1999 at the Marriott Wardman Hotel amidst beautiful autumn weather. Peter G.W. Keen was the keynote speaker for this year's plenary session entitled "People, Process, and Technology: Two Out of Three Is Not Enough". Keen has served on the faculties of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, with visiting positions at universities abroad. He has also worked as adviser to senior managers at such companies as British Airways, British Telecom, Citibank, Glaxo, IBM, MCI, and the World Bank. A prolific writer, Keen has strongly influenced the business-technology dialogue. His latest book is The Process Edge: Creating Value Where It Counts (1997). Keen's message for the AMIA audience emphasized that technology alone is not enough. The unwritten themes that emerged from this year's AMIA meeting included three over-riding areas that permeate medical informatics applications across the country: data mining, web-enabled patient records (and corresponding privacy issues), and standardized/structured terminology issues. There were approximately 500 concurrent scientific papers, panels, and poster presentations as well as a large exhibit area with many health care information systems vendors and publishers. In addition, 44 tutorials and 12 evening workshops provided pre-conference information for many conference attendees. The National Library of Medicine had an impressive display and presence this year, as well as newly emerging medical informatics programs that were recruiting students for various universities around the country. Numerous awards were offered for best papers and posters http://www.amia.org/meetin~s/f99/program/awards.html. Students are actively involved and recognized for their work in a highly competitive student paper competition that covers expenses for informatics students to attend the conference. http://www.amia.org/meetings/f99/program/student_paper.html. The closing debate for this year's AMIA meeting included a lively debate sponsored by the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) that addressed an ever-present "issue as to whether medical informatics is a single field or a collection of subfields. To explore this issue, ACMI framed the debate around the following proposition: Resolved: Medical informatics and nursing inforrnatics are distinctive disciplines that require their own core curricula, training programs, and professional identities. While the proposition focused on informatics as it applies to medicine and nursing, the issues apply to all of AMIA's membership and includes physicians, nurses, computer scientists, biomedical engineers, librarians, veterinarians, dentists, and other affiliated health care roles. Debaters for the affirmative were Patricia Flatley Brerman, RN, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin (and AMIA president-elect) and Milton Corn, MD, of the National Library of Medicine. The debaters for the negative were Judy G. Ozbolt, PhD, RN, of Vanderbilt University and Edward H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD, of Stanford University. Dan Masys, MD, of the University of California-San Diego, moderated. Thought provoking debate did not yield defmitive decisions about whether medical informatics is a single domain or collection of sub-fields, thus the debate continues!

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