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Learning from Colleagues about Healthcare IT Implementation and Optimization: Lessons from a Medical Informatics Listserv

  • Education & Training
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Abstract

Communication among medical informatics communities can suffer from fragmentation across multiple forums, disciplines, and subdisciplines; variation among journals, vocabularies and ontologies; cost and distance. Online communities help overcome these obstacles, but may become onerous when listservs are flooded with cross-postings. Rich and relevant content may be ignored. The American Medical Informatics Association successfully addressed these problems when it created a virtual meeting place by merging the membership of four working groups into a single listserv known as the “Implementation and Optimization Forum.” A communication explosion ensued, with thousands of interchanges, hundreds of topics, commentaries from “notables,” neophytes, and students – many from different disciplines, countries, traditions. We discuss the listserv’s creation, illustrate its benefits, and examine its lessons for others. We use examples from the lively, creative, deep, and occasionally conflicting discussions of user experiences – interchanges about medication reconciliation, open source strategies, nursing, ethics, system integration, and patient photos in the EMR – all enhancing knowledge, collegiality, and collaboration.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge those who granted permission to quote their listserv postings from http://communities.amia.org/implementation, the contributions of the Forum members, the volunteer analysis team’s inspiration, and the work already accomplished to create a database of educational resources. We also are grateful to Donald Schnader of IVR Care Transition Systems for his very helpful technical expertise.

Conflict of interest

None.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, Box 3703 DUMC, Durham, NC, 27710, USA

    Martha B. Adams

  2. Division of Clinical Informatics, Department of Community and Family Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, Box 3703 DUMC, Durham, NC, 27710, USA

    Martha B. Adams

  3. Duke Center for Health Informatics, Duke University Medical Center, Box 3703 DUMC, Durham, NC, 27710, USA

    Martha B. Adams

  4. Yale Center for Medical Informatics, Yale University School of Medicine, 238 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Bonnie Kaplan

  5. Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Yale University, 238 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Bonnie Kaplan

  6. The Information Society Project at Yale Law School, Yale University, 238 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT, 06511, USA

    Bonnie Kaplan

  7. Founder, IVR Care Transition Systems, 621-H Idlewild Circle, Birmingham, AL, 35205, USA

    Heather J. Sobko

  8. Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, 55 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa, ON, K1N 6N5, Canada

    Craig Kuziemsky

  9. Biomedical and Health Informatics Program, University of Wisconsin, 234 Lapham Hall, 3209 N. Maryland Avenue, Milwaukee, WI, 53201, USA

    Kourosh Ravvaz

  10. Sociology Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Ross Koppel

  11. Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Medical School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Ross Koppel

  12. LDI, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Ross Koppel

  13. 813 Pardee Lane, Wyncote, PA, 19095, USA

    Ross Koppel

Authors
  1. Martha B. Adams
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  2. Bonnie Kaplan
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  3. Heather J. Sobko
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  4. Craig Kuziemsky
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  5. Kourosh Ravvaz
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  6. Ross Koppel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martha B. Adams.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Education & Training

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Adams, M.B., Kaplan, B., Sobko, H.J. et al. Learning from Colleagues about Healthcare IT Implementation and Optimization: Lessons from a Medical Informatics Listserv. J Med Syst 39, 157 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0157-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-014-0157-3

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