Last week I flew (and flew and flew) to Cape Town, South Africa, to attend the 13th International Congress on Medical Informatics and present “Process-Aware EHR BPM Systems” (co-authored with Mark Copenhaver). Held every three years, I’ve been to five of six Medinfo conferences held since 1995 in Vancouver, Canada. Medinfo is a crystal ball that can predict the future of health information systems. Many ideas behind currently marketed HIT products I first encountered at one or another Medinfo conference.
I’ve written about Fitts and Hicks laws (big buttons are easier, faster, and less errorful to hit), designing modern EMRs around interruptions at the point of care, modular and open source EMR platforms, and process models within and between healthcare organizations. I naturally gravitated to related Medinfo sessions, presentations, and workshops. These ideals are already beginning to emerge in work-a-day software products in healthcare and eventually will become mainstream.
However this post is just a short photo travelogue. So, enjoy!
Cape Town is a working seaport with a sense of humor. The Coca-Cola guy is a sixty foot statue made of big red Cola-Cola crates. That’s Table Mountain to his left.
The Medinfo 2010 logo includes the profile of Table Mountain.
This Cape Town veterinary clinic has its own fun sculpture.
The water is very, very cold at Cape Town’s Camps Bay beach.
And the winds are intense. The winds blew this tree to the right…
…while across the street this pine leans in the opposite direction. Supposedly the wind bounces off the buildings to cause this. But I wonder.
This billboard says “Our volunteers are always on call: Sea Rescue” Yes, that volunteer lifesaver is a woman in a wedding dress!
And the next Medinfo, in 2013, will be in Copenhagen, Denmark. I suspect we will see even more, then, about user interfaces with big buttons, interruptions in healthcare, modular and open source EMR platforms, and process models. Plus many other fascinating ideas.