Connection Alliance for Nursing Informatics

Message From Hyeoun-Ae Park, President-Elect of the International Medical Informatics Association Hyeoun-Ae Park, PhD, RN, FAAN DOI: 10.1097/CIN.0000000000000037

It is a great honor and privilege for me to have been elected as president of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) during Medinfo2013, held in late August 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I will serve as president of IMIA from 2015 to 2017. I will be the first nurse, the third woman (following Dr Marion Ball and Prof Nancy Lorenzi), and the third Asian (following Prof Shigekoto Kaihara and Prof K. C. Lun) to be President of IMIA. I would like to introduce IMIA briefly. An international organization that plays a major role in promoting and furthering health and biomedical informatics globally, IMIA was originally established in 1967 as Technical Committee 4 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). It became a fully independent organization in 1979. The IMIA membership comprises member societies, institutional members, affiliate members, and honorary fellows. Member societies can be a society, a group of societies, or an appropriate body, which is representative of the health and biomedical informatics activities within a country. Only one member society may be admitted from a country. For example, the American Medical Informatics Association is the member society representing the 578

United States in IMIA. As of August 2013, there were 59 member societies. In a country where no representative society exists, IMIA accommodates involvement through corresponding members, especially in the case of developing countries. As of May 2013, there were 31 corresponding members. Member societies may organize into regional groups, and IMIA now has regions that cover the whole of the globe: Latin America and the Caribbean (IMIA-LAC), Europe (EFMI), Asia/Pacific (APAMI), Africa (HELINA), North America (IMIA North America), and the Middle East (MEAHI). AMIA is a member of IMIA North America. Institutional members belong to one of two categories, corporate or academic. Corporate institutional members include vendor, consulting, and technology firms as well as national professional organizations. Academic institutional members include universities, colleges, research foundations, and other institutions that have academic or research programs in health and/or medical informatics. Affiliate members are international organizations that share an interest in the broad field of health and biomedical informatics. Currently, the IFIP, the International Federation of Health Information Management, and the World health Organization (WHO) are affiliate members of IMIA. Honorary fellows are individuals who have demonstrated exceptional merit in furthering the aims and interests of IMIA; fellowship is conferred for life. Through working groups and special interest groups (WGs and SIGs), IMIA pursues its scientific activity in specific fields of the wider domain of health and biomedical informatics. A WG or SIG comprises a group of experts with a particular interest. Currently there are 24 WGs and SIGs. Nursing informatics is one of the IMIA SIGs. The internationally acclaimed “World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics,” commonly known as

CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing



December 2013

Copyright © 2013 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

Medinfo, is organized by IMIA. The event provides scientific exchange of current research and thinking in health and biomedical informatics and an opportunity for formal meetings and informal networking among IMIA members. The event is jointly hosted by IMIA and one of its member societies. The next Medinfo events will be held in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in 2015, and Beijing, China, in 2017. The annual IMIAYearbook of Medical Informatics and three additional official journals are published by IMIA. The IMIA Yearbook is designed to present an overview of the most original and excellent state-of-the-art research conducted in the past year in the area of health and biomedical informatics and to provide both surveys about recent developments and comprehensive reviews of relevant topics in the field, and information about IMIA itself. The three official IMIA journals are the International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI), Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM), and Applied Clinical Informatics (ACI). While IJMI emphasizes the evaluation of systems in healthcare settings, MIM stresses the methodology and scientific fundamentals of organizing, representing and analyzing data, information, and knowledge in biomedicine and healthcare, and ACI is the “practical” journal of IMIA, with editorial subject matters covering clinical information systems; administrative management systems; e-health systems; information technology development, deployment, and evaluation; sociotechnical aspects of information technology; and health information technology training. Now I would like to introduce myself and my experiences. I received my BSN from Seoul National University and went on to earn my MSN and my MS and PhD in biostatistics and health informatics, from the University of Minnesota (U of M) Schools of Nursing and Public Health, respectively. My postdoctorate education includes a 1-year fellowship in health informatics at the U of M, and 1 year of research in SNOMED-CT at the College of American Pathologists. My research topic as a graduate student at U of M was computer simulation of chronic disease models, and I did my own computer programming in FORTRAN and C++. My knowledge of computer languages and programs is a valuable asset in my career as a researcher and an educator, because I am able to articulate more clearly what I want to communicate to my research team members or students. Earlier in my career, I worked for 5 years for a research institute affiliated with the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare. During my tenure as a research fellow, I was involved in national policy and the development of the health center information system, emergency medical call system, and regional health formation system in Korea. My experience at the research institute taught me how to prepare research proposals and reports, again a very valuable asset as a scholar. Then I moved to the College of Nursing, Seoul National University, my alma mater. The theme of my research evolved into the use of informatics in nursing education, research, and practice. I introduced informatics to nursing education and nursing practice in Korea and was the first in the nation to

offer a nursing informatics (NI) course. I also introduced master’s and PhD programs in NI, again a first in Korea. Since I moved to academia, my primary areas of research have been data models and ways to ensure the semantic interoperability of healthcare vocabulary/terminology, making especial use of ICNP (International Classification for Nursing Practice) and SNOMED CT. I applied terminology and data models to electronic health records systems. I was involved in the development of the first standard terminology-based electronic nursing records system in Korea. For this, our research team first translated ICNP into Korean. Then we collected and standardized nursing narratives used in nursing progress notes and mapped them to ICNP. A terminology-based electronic nursing records system allowed for structured data entry, which could be easily reused for research. To improve the quality of data in the electronic nursing records system, we began to model nursing assessment data used in nursing documentation using entity-attribute-value triplets. A natural language generation system was developed to automatically generate nursing narratives from these data models. These activities led to the introduction of data model-based electronic nursing records system in 2013, again a first in Korea. Based on my research experiences, I authored and coauthored more than 200 articles published in national and international journals, more than 30 chapters in books published in Korean and English, and I also made more than 100 presentations at national and international conferences on the areas of my expertise. Through publications and presentations, I was recognized as one of the leading scholars in NI nationally and internationally. I served as a member of the strategic advisory group for the ICNP of ICN (International Council of Nurses) for many years. I organized the ninth International Congress on Nursing Informatics, and I also served as a vice chair of the IMIA-NI SIG for over 6 years. Currently, I am the chair of NI SIG of the IMIA. I was also recognized as an informatics expert by multiple interprofessional organizations impacting technology and informatics in healthcare, such as IMIA and the ISO (International Standard Organization). I served as the country representative to the ISO Technical Committee 125 on Health Informatics for 5 years, as a technical advisory group member for more than 10 years, and have been serving as the vice president for WGs and SIGs for IMIA for 6 years. I have been recognized for my achievements nationally and internationally with various awards and honors. I received the 2004 Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals from the U of M. I also received the U of M School of Nursing Centennial 100 Distinguished Alumni Award in 2008. I was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2011. My colleagues in the Korean Society of Medical Informatics conferred the great honor of a Distinguished Service Award to me at the fall congress, held in November 2013. Now, I would like to talk about what I would like to focus on during my presidency. I would like to infuse new

CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing



December 2013

Copyright © 2013 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

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biomedical and health informatics blood into IMIA to ensure a sustainable future for the organization. For this, I would like to introduce a mentoring system to support the professional development of young scholars in biomedical and health informatics. I also would like to introduce a student forum—as I did in IMIA-NI SIG—to bring together students interested in biomedical and health informatics across the globe. I would like to encourage student discussion, collaboration, and learning among themselves regardless of their location. I would like to see a student track in future Medinfo conferences. I would like to encourage horizontal collaborations among IMIA WGs and SIGs and vertical collaborations of IMIA WGs and SIGs with mirror WGs in the regional member societies. Even though there have been horizontal and vertical collaborations before in the IMIA, I would like to encourage IMIAWGs and SIGs to pursue more collaborative activities. I also would like to see IMIAWG and SIGs collaborate with other associations and societies in the field, such as the ISO, WHO, or IEEE. As a president-elect from the Asia-Pacific Region, I am interested in health informatics in developing countries. I would like to identify the existing gap in health informatics between developed and developing countries and the ways to close it. I will pay more attention to issues

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more relevant to developing countries, such as health informatics education, standardization, telehealth, and open source. As the first nurse to be elected as the president-elect of IMIA, I would like to be an advocate for NI in the wider IMIA community. Even though nurses are the largest group of healthcare professionals participating in the various IMIA events, we are underrepresented in the leadership. I would like to encourage nurses to participate more actively in WG or SIG activities and to serve on IMIA committees at national, regional, and global levels in order to increase the visibility of NI in the IMIA community. For this, I would like to solicit support from the leaders in NI. As president-elect, I will do my best to implement the strategic plan of IMIA and to pursue a vision elaborated so well by past President Reinhold Haux: “That IMIA provides a model example for successful, tolerant, and peaceful collaboration of individuals, beyond any nations and cultures, for the sake of health and quality of life of the people in our world.” The author has disclosed that she has no significant relationships with, or financial interest in, any commercial companies pertaining to this article.

CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing



December 2013

Copyright © 2013 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

Message from Hyeoun-Ae Park, president-elect of the International Medical Informatics Association.

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