MEDICAL INFORMATICS SECTION

2007-2008 Annual Report

Goal 1: Recruitment, Membership and Leadership in the Profession

Currently, MIS has 425 members, 32 who joined in 2008. Last year the section had 447 members with 72 new members, so we need to continue to determine if we are meeting the needs of the members. Sadie Honey, membership committee chair, updated the misbus listserv in April to reflect the current members.

In an effort to improve awareness of the section, MIS plans to participate in the Section Shuffle event at the MLA conference in Chicago and has contributed $200 towards the event. MIS will hold a tech trivia contest during the event. Those who answer all the questions correctly will be entered in a raffle to win an iPod Nano. Beth Whipple and Sadie Honey are leading the Section Shuffle effort for MIS.

Janis Brown, chair, solicited volunteers in August to assist with various section tasks and received eight responses. The section also conducted a member survey in late January using Survey Monkey to determine member preferences in order to respond better to member needs. 120 members responded to the survey, including 19 members who are interested in being more involved in the section. One notable result of the survey was a high interest (74%) in a blog for the section.

The MIS Nominating Committee was chaired by Kathy Kerdolff, MIS Past-Chair, and included members Ana Clevland and Beth Whipple. They selected two qualified candidates to run for the office of Chair-Elect: The election was the first ballot distributed since the revised bylaws went into effect in May 2007. Ballots were distributed to the MIS business listserv via SurveyMonkey on January 14th. Three hundred eighty-five ballots were sent. A reminder message was distributed January 29th to members who had not voted. On February 13th the election was closed. One hundred thirty six MIS members voted for the office of Chair-elect. Colleen Cuddy was elected by a majority vote having received 70 votes to Lisa Traditi’s 66 votes. MIS purchased a copy of SurveyMonkey to conduct section business. Since the section has more than 100 members, we could not use the free version of SurveyMonkey.

The MIS Nominating Committee Nominee Eileen Stanley was approved by the MIS board. Her name was submitted to be on the MLA Nominating Committee ballot for Section Council. Eileen Stanley was one of the winners of the Section Council vote, so her name will be on the MLA ballot in the fall.

Bette Sydelko, secretary-treasurer, has been working with Ray Naegele, MLA director for Financial and Administrative Services, to develop a new model for section banking and reporting to alleviate the problem of transferring the bank account with each change of secretary-treasurer. She will continue to work out details, so that procedures are well established before the next secretary-treasurer takes office next year.

Goal 2: Life Long Learning

For the annual meeting, Laura Barrett, chair-elect, arranged two sessions. In response to feedback from last year’s session, MIS is sponsoring a second year of Top Technology Trends with an expanded and slightly revised panel of experts. This year’s panelists include Sadie Honey, Michelle Kraft, Wallace McLendon, Bart Ragon, Gabriel Rios, and Eric Schnell with Susan Lessick as the moderator and Rikke Ogawa as the Google Jockey. This year's panel session is co-sponsored with Educational Media & Technology Section. In a related effort, Eric Schnell created a Facebook group for MLA Technology Trends <http://usc.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2464357736> to discuss new trends. (The group currently has 153 members.) In addition, the section is the lead sponsor of a contributed paper session on Technologies in Teaching. From nine abstracts submitted, four were accepted, including papers from Jaime Friel Blanck, Feili Tu, Alan Williams, and Josephine Tan. The August call for volunteers identified three members who reviewed the paper submissions, including Jaime Friel Blanck, Patricia Sarchet and Brenda Seago.

MIS is interested in utilizing social networking tools. Catherine Marlow chaired a newly created task force on social networking to determine ways that the tools can be used by the section. Other committee members were Janis Brown and Bart Ragon, who chaired the MLA task force on social networking. The MIS survey asked members to indicate their interest in using some of the tools as described above. In addition to interest in using a blog, about 39% of the survey participants indicated interest in using Del.icio.us for recommending web sites, in using Facebook to discuss technology trends and in taking the MLA Web 2.0 101 course.

The MIS CE Committee received some feedback from the survey about interests of the members and their preferred method of learning. They will use that data as they consider future recommendations regarding continuing education need by MIS members.

Goal 3: Advocacy

The responsibility for publicizing the Medical Informatics Section/MLA Career Development Grant is the responsibility of the MLA committee. However, Janis Brown, MIS chair, forwarded the message from MLA about the grant to MIS members and sent out a reminder prior to the deadline to help generate more applicants. Last year, there were no recipients of the grant. This year there are two recipients, Karen Albert and Maureen (Molly) Knapp.

The section donated $1000 again this year to the Lindberg Research Endowment.

Goal 4: Creating and Communicating our Knowledge

Nic Cecchino, MIS web master, revised the MIS web site transferring the site into PHP to make changes and updates easier to accomplish in the future. He continues his diligent efforts of keeping the site updated. Kathy Kerdolff and Marcia Henry are working on updating the section history using a Google doc as a means of collaborating.

MOTION

This report is informational and requires no action by the Board of directors.

Respectfully submitted,

Janis Brown, Chair, Medical Informatics Section

Officers & Committee Personnel, 2007-2008
Marie Ascher Bylaws Chair (06/06 – 05/08)
Laura Barrett Chair-elect/Program Chair (06/07 – 05/08)
Nic Cecchino Webmaster (12/03 – 05/08)
Sadie Honey Membership Committee Chair (06/06 – 05/08)
Kathy Kerdolff Immediate Past Chair/Nominating Committee Chair (06/07 – 05/08)
Susan Lessick Section Council Representative (06/05 – 05/08)
Catherine Marlow Social Networking Task Force Chair (09/07 – 01/08)
Brenda Seago Government Relations Liaison (06/04 – 05/08)
Bette Sydelko Secretary/Treasurer (06/07 – 05/09)
Lisa Traditi Professional Development Liaison/CE Committee Chair (06/04 – 05/08)
Elizabeth Whipple Section Council Representative-Elect (06/07 – 05/08)
Janis Brown MIS Section Chair (06/07 – 05/08)

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