Executive Summary
The main purpose of this workshop is to bring together "thought leaders" from a wide spectrum of organizations, i.e. academia, industry, legislative, advocacy and foundations to identify a broad collection of challenges and opportunities resulting from the deployment and use of electronic medical records (EMRs) in healthcare.
The over-arching goal for this workshop is to identify new ways to expand the capabilities provided by cyber-infrastructure and associated services and expertise in the information, computer /computational and mathematical sciences to address challenges in the detection, prevention, treatment and control of disease through the implementation and use of EMRs. To this end, we will explore how EMRs can be deployed effectively and securely to enhance patient safety and improve treatment outcome. In addition, we will explore novel approaches to incorporating the knowledge gained from mining collected data to develop new intervention strategies in the clinic and throughout the drug discovery process.
These goals frame a rich set of challenges and opportunities for the application of the information, computing, and decision sciences. Numerous advances across computing sub-disciplines could be harnessed, via focused research and engineering, to provide value to consumers, care providers, and to public health researchers. In particular, creative efforts in machine learning and inference, location-based services, networking, exploiting very large-scale data management, storage, mining and visualization, harnessing social media and human-computer interaction technologies could reduce healthcare costs and overall improve the quality of health outcomes.
One expected outcome of this workshop is to bring together an interdisciplinary community of collaborators (both at the state level and at the national or even international level) with a common goal of conducting research to address the challenges/opportunities inherent in the deployment and use of EMRs, evaluating issues that may arise from their use in different settings (i.e. small practices to large hospitals and network of hospitals as part of a Health Information Exchange) and then translating the knowledge gained to guide the provisioning of high quality healthcare thereby leading to improved long-term health outcomes for all.
Who Should Attend
Participants will represent a wide variety of interests and expertise from academia, industry, State government, advocacy and foundation organizations. It is anticipated that in addition to interacting at the workshop with fellow participants coming from other disciplines and backgrounds, participants will bring results of the workshop back to their communities to foster increased interest in innovative uses of computing and information science and engineering for the deployment of EMRs to advance and improve healthcare outcomes.
Workshop Goals: The goals of the workshop are to:
Meeting Structure
This one-day workshop will focus on the New Jersey stakeholder community and on understanding issues specific to deployment and benefit of EMRs in the state. A later workshop (to be scheduled)swill be more technically focused and take a broader geographic perspective. The current workshop will be devoted to addressing policy and implementation issues with participation of key stakeholders from the healthcare industry, State government and academia. Each of the sessions (where appropriate) will have a plenary talk followed by short presentations from leaders in the field to define particular implementation, deployment, operational and research challenges, outlining possible lines of attack to address these challenges, and suggestions for possible test-beds or demonstration systems. Participants will be encouraged to (a) articulate and synthesize the issues that need to be addressed to meet the challenges, and (b) identify opportunities defined in the earlier sessions specifically targeted to address the needs of the healthcare community.
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