Some Brief News Follow-Ups – All Good News!

MedInfo2007 is in full swing for the next few days. I hope all those attending in Brisbane have a profitable and intellectually stimulating time. I look forward to hearing all about it!

I have had great reports on the First World Congress on Pathology Informatics which ran on
August 16 -17 August, 2007.

For those who are interested there is a rich store of downloads of presentations available for download here.

I am told the key outcome from the Congress (the Conference Communiqué ) made three major points:

1. There will be an increased reliance on the laboratory (including genetics) and medical imaging and these will converge as disciplines and do things that humans cannot do without informatics.

2. Pathology informatics is a discipline in its own right and training is required – but policy makers do not know what they don’t know.

3. There is going to be an enormous workforce problem.

I must say – having browsed many of the presentations – how true this is!

It seems the next Congress is to happen in two years (somewhere in the USA) and that IMIA is going to offer support with the creation of a specialist working group.

It is great to be able to report there were 134 attendees from a zillion different places at the Congress and that in addition to all the tutorials etc 15 new scientific papers were also presented.

Well done to the organising team!

Lastly I need to report the usage of the blog passed 20,000 visits since March 2006 on the weekend with well over 33,000 page reads in the same period. Obviously more than my Mum is reading!

Thanks for all for the support.

David.