ITCH 2013

Posting from the Information Technology & Communications in Health conference in Victoria, BC – hosted by my grad school, the School of Health Information Science at the University of Victoria. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, at the last conference (2011) I was here to scope out the MSc program and the faculty for grad school opps! And here I am, all done my course work and only thesis ahead

Wonderful to catch up with classmates, faculty, other familiar faces, and (of course) meet new people!

The main topics that are holding my interest here include public informatics, consumer informatics, social media, empowered clients/patients, and informatics education (yes, I still have a problem with narrowing my focus…).

Here are links to the two posters I submitted.

• Practice implications of consumer health informatics: access, retrieval, and literacy
• Human factors in health care: the application of twitter

There were certainly some lessons learned for me with these posters:

• In the CHI poster: too many words – must cut down, because nobody wants to read all that text
• In both: too general. To be fair, these were based on literature reviews, not completed studies. Anyhow, this did mean I didn’t have a solid methods or results section – which definitely seemed to be a point of interest with the judges
• In both: abstract ideas – the empowered consumer and social media are still not quite crowd-winning and tangible enough. Great ideas – but people need more (le sigh, guess I need to finish my thesis and THEN I’ll have a nice deliverable on consumer informatics and social media!)
• Bonus points: many positive comments on design

Adios! Off to my next concurrent!
-Angela

Human factors in health care: the application of twitter