On June 24-28, 1995, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) will sponsor its sixth annual Spring Congress. The conference, which will take place at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge Hotel, has the theme: Capturing the Clinical Encounter. Funding is requested from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) Center for Research Dissemination and Liaison, in order to improve attendance by reducing registration fees and to foster dissemination of the results of the conference. AMIA is the North American society devoted to the study and use of computers and information in health care. Capturing the Clinical Encounter refers to gathering clinical data in electronic form for use in clinical care, research, quality assurance, and management. Whereas a great deal of administrative and financial data are currently collected by health information systems, only incomplete and often unreliable clinical data are collected. The most important clinical information--patient's complaints, symptoms, signs, and history-- are completely missing in most systems. Recently, both the need to capture clinical data and the individual technologies that will give us the ability to capture clinical data have advanced significantly. It is therefore an opportune time to bring together researchers, clinicians, and implementors so that we can exploit these new technologies in integrated system and accomplish Capturing the Clinical Encounter.
The specific aims of the conference are to increase awareness of the importance and benefits of capturing data; provide a forum to present new research in data capture and storage methods; promote collaboration among experts; educate attendees about the capture, storage, and use of clinical data; disseminate the results of the conference; and evaluate the success of the conference.
