MBL/NLM MI Day 1: What's biomedical informatics anyway?

While I've simultaneously been excited about and scared of my time as a Marine Biological Laboratory/National Library of Medicine (MBL/NLM) fellow, I've never had a quick and easy way to say exactly what it is I'm studying here this week.

After our first full day of class, I still don't.

This is Dr. Jim Cimino at the beginning of our session mapping out our class answers to 'What is Biomedical informatics?'. Please note that all our presentation links won't last forever, if you see something you like grab it now.


That's about half the whiteboard and the other half has just as much scrawl to it. There is no elevator speech answer! Jim also did a great job in his afternoon database design presentation, and I'm remembering his class exercise activity on mapping out tables for a database with a Medline citation as a model to work from in my own teaching.

This is Dr. Joyce Mitchell's great bioinformatics presentation about genetics and the exciting opportunities that are in development now about research in the field and for us to think about how to integrate them into electronic medical records (EMRs).


Unfortunately I can't remember if the slide that was added in was part of Sid Phillips's presentation or Victor Cid's about the Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC). It noted that 'swine flu' was the most-searched topic on Yahoo at one point, displacing 'American Idol', the Wikipedia swine flu page received 1.3 million hits, and Twitter had 125,000 swine flu tweets a day accounting for 1% of total traffic there.

This is both of them at the beginning of Victor's presentation which I highly recommend, very cutting edge information about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in disaster communication.


We also watched the University of Michigan's Health Sciences Library's YouTube video about Second Life and Public Health

Whew! Enough of all that, here is the beautiful setting of Woods Hole looking out across the Great Harbor.