IT in action

AMDIS awards go to three docs, one organization

Three physicians and one organization are winners of the 2012 awards for outstanding achievement in applied medical informatics from the Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems.

This is the 13th annual round of AMDIS awards, to be presented at the 21st annual AMDIS Physician-Computer Connection Symposium this week in Ojai, Calif.

Two federally funded Beacon Communities experimenting in health IT connectivity—almost on opposite sides of the country, in San Diego and Western New York—are represented in award winners Dr. James Killeen, on the left coast, and HealtheLink, in Buffalo, N.Y. The Military Health System has an honoree in Dr. (and Col.) James Scott for his work in transferring the records of the last patients at venerable Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, to their new home in Bethesda, Md. Meanwhile, award winner Dr. Steve Arendt has been busy pushing the computerized decision-support envelope at his hospital in Rancho Mirage, Calif. All are profiled on the next three pages.

AMDIS President Dr. William Bria, corporate director for medical informatics at the Shriners Hospitals for Children, was called to the White House last week to meet with other top national health IT leaders, including Dr. Farzad Mostashari, head of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

“He (Mostashari) was talking all about the current state of penetration of meaningful use and they’re very proud they’re moving on,” Bria says. “But it’s obvious that we’re still in the early days of health information exchange and really making the breakthroughs we need.”

“This is celebrating the applied side of medical informatics,” Bria says. This year’s AMDIS award winners, “by grabbing the bull by horns, have excelled in the application of these systems into mainstream medicine.” They eminently merit these awards.”