October 30th-31st & November 1st, 2008 Biomedical Sciences Faculty of the Universidad Austral Pilar - Buenos Aires

	Organized by

Congress Committee

Horonary President: Valerio Yácubsohn
President: Juan C Di Lucca
Vice president: Fernan González Bernaldo de Quirós
Scientific Chair: Daniel Luna
Scientific co-chairs: Jorge Insua y Guillermo Reynoso
Secretariat Manager: Elida Casal
Secretariat Manager assistants: Hector Repossi y Humberto Mandirola

Overall considerations

Healthcare systems are globally harassed by two painful and simultaneous diseases: growing costs and wide variation on outcomes implying serious alterations on quality of care provision.

If a comparable quantity of errors in the healthcare domain were committed in air navigation system,
airplanes will not be allowed to fly.

Achievement of advances in quality and productivity of healthcare organizations will be possible
through the development of Medical Care Integrated Systems, connected through informatics solutions, and nabled to generate real time knowledge, thus allowing good management practices based in actual easures and continuous improvement of medical processes.

Medical Informatics is now the only way to leverage the transformations combining this simultaneous increase of quality, patient staff safety, and staff efficiency.

It’s considered a tool for strategic innovation and has to be placed among the top priorities in the
agenda of the upper management of healthcare organizations.

Medical informatics will be transformed into ‘the stethoscope of the XXI st century’, and this is why this ongress becomes especially relevant.

We estimate an audience of around 400 persons, physicians and managers of healthcare-related
enterprises from Argentina, Spain and Latin America. his organization is being held collaboratively between groups from all over Latin America (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, etc.)

The IMIA board (one of the world’s most influential Medical Informatics associations) will have its
annual meeting in Buenos Aires, and the board members will act as featured speakers of the congress.

The Congress will be held in the premises of the Biomedical Sciences Faculty of the Universidad Austral en Pilar, Buenos Aires, between October 28th and October 31th , 2008

Goals

• Improve knowledge and skills of the participants on using and managing information technologiesand their relationship with the healthcare domain.
• Promote the exchange of information between the participants emphasizing the integration of regional contact networks.
• Show and discuss topics related to the development, application and evaluation of IT in healthcare.
• Provide an ample portfolio of presentations detailing the work, progress, and challenges in the development of healthcare information systems, both in theoretical and applied fields.
• Present the methodologies of application, investigation and outcomes of informatics in the healthcare domain.

Modality

• Tutorials
• Workshops
• Plenary Conference
• Expert Panels
• Scientific Papers Oral Presentation
• Posters and e-papers Presentation

Prizes

• Best Original Work (Oral – Poster)
• Best Student WorkSystems
  

Important Dates

Preliminary Topics

• Healthcare Information Technology Project Evaluation.
• Project Management: how to implement within time and budget.
• How to choose and implement an EHR.
• How to find out the benefits of an EHR (fast).
• Decision support in healthcare information systems.
• Clinical and administrative database integration.
• Change Management in Healthcare Organizations.
• GIS y Public Healthcare.
• PHR and healthcare portals.
• PACS and multimedia EHR.
• Safety, confidentiality and privacy in healthcare: technology and process.
• Digital Signature: can it be really implemented?
• Terminology and controlled vocabularies.
• Introduction to HL7.
• Introduction to CDA and CCD.
• Natural language processing in healthcare.
• Medical classification and biomedical ontology: principles and development.
• ROI and information systems.
• Design and development of evaluation studies in medical informatics.
• Qualitative methodology for analyzing medical informatics projects.
• Use of the clinical repository for measuring processes, quality and outcomes in care provision.
• Information Systems in healthcare sites: uses, users, and basis for their use.
• Information Systems in the Emergency Room.
• Healthcare Workflow in front of the patient: the big challenge.
• Quality Assurance in all care provision processes.
• Info-buttons and access to biomedical information sources.
• Digital gap: can the information systems be used by everyone?
• Patient Safety.
• Barcode and RFID technology to improve safety in the use of medications.
• Unintended outcomes of innovations in healthcare information systems.
• How to make electronic prescription real.
• Standards for storage and exchange of information in healthcare.
• From the use of paper to standardized and semantic interoperable information systems.
• Secondary use for clinical data: investigation, epidemiology, healthcare policy.
• Use of Open Source Software in healthcare.