Women in health informatics

On Friday, September 20th, I had the pleasure to debut as a meetup organiser and run one of the monthly meetings of ‘Women in Health Informatics’ meetup at Aginic office in Melbourne.

The group, which officially started in November last year, gathers women working in all aspects of health informatics or wanting to transition into this area. We are a very diverse group. Some of us started as health professionals (GPs, nurses, speech pathologists) and later got interested in digital health technology. Others came from an IT or computer science background and discovered their passion for Health Care along the way.

We came together to create a space where we can learn from each other’s experiences and think of ways to drive better outcomes in Health Care. This month we decided to add more structure to our meeting and for the first time introduced member talks.

To kick things off, I spoke about customised Power BI dashboards combining Health Care and demographic data to provide a holistic view of catchment area performance. It was great sharing some of my day-to-day work at Aginic with people genuinely invested in improving the quality of care in Australia and get asked some challenging questions.

The second speaker was Dr Heather Leslie, who spoke about the openEHR project. She raised an important point about why we should care not only about the Big Data but also about the clinical data at the unit level. I truly enjoyed her clear explanation of terms such as an archetype, a dataset, and a data dictionary.

As an analyst, I work with Health Care data a lot. Over time I have observed the complex clinical terminology that is used a lot across the sector, often prone to change and not necessarily consistent across countries, vendors, and organisations. Therefore the concept of open and transparent platform for electronic health records, and interoperable clinical and research data truly speaks to me.

The presentation precipitated heated discussions lasting until late at night. We decided we want to continue sharing our knowledge and ideas, and we hope our group will continue to grow and inspire new, exciting collaborations.

Thanks to everyone for participating and to Aginic for the sponsorship of the event!

If you’re based in Melbourne and want to get involved, please feel free to reach out. We’ll be sure to keep these events posted across our Aginic social channels as they come up!