Informatics Professor
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This blog maintains the thoughts on various topics related to biomedical and health informatics by Dr. William Hersh, Professor, and Chair, Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University. He also co-leads efforts to teach clinical informatics to other health professions students.
Informatics Professor
11h ago
A new generative artificial intelligence (AI) study presents some interesting findings.(1) Physicians randomized to conventional information resources plus or minus ChatGPT-4 showed no significant difference in their ability to solve diagnostic vignettes. In other words, physician access to ChatGPT did not improve their diagnostic ability. Another finding, however, was that ChatGPT alone scored far better than each group of physicians. The results can be interpreted in different ways, from generative AI providing no value for physicians to it performing superior to them.
This is a good study ..read more
Informatics Professor
5M ago
The Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Commencement and School Hooding Ceremonies, also known as Graduation, is always a special event for me. It is a pleasure to celebrate graduates of our Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program completing their studies and moving on to the next steps in their careers. Since our program had its first graduates in 1998, I have only missed the ceremony once, due to a conflict with a National Institutes of Health meeting I was required to attend.
This year our program has 22 graduates, distributed among our PhD (3), Master of Science (15), and Graduat ..read more
Informatics Professor
8M ago
Periodically in this blog, lately once a year, I review all of my professional accomplishments, including honors, talks given, papers published, and more for the past year. Last year was a transitional year for me professionally, as I stepped down from two leadership positions as Chair of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) and from being Director of the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. As seen in this post, however, my productivity did not miss a beat in 2023, and in fact I am enjoying my work as ..read more
Informatics Professor
9M ago
How much of the hype for artificial intelligence (AI) that will truly impact health, healthcare, and research is an unknown. The potential benefits are unequivocal, from assistant patients pursue actions to improve their health to giving guidance to clinicians in diagnosis and treatment to helping researchers find information and devise new ideas to advance their research.
I have published an invited post in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Musings from the Mezzanine Blog, the blog of the Director of the NLM. I chose to update some of my past writings posted in this blog with a new ..read more
Informatics Professor
9M ago
When I was putting the finishing touches on the 4th edition of my textbook on information retrieval (IR, also known as search) in the domain on biomedicine and health in 2020, I wondered whether the major problems in the field of IR were mostly solved. Retrieval systems such as Google for general Web searching and PubMed for the biomedical literature were robust and mature. One literally had the world’s written knowledge at their fingertips for general and biomedical topics from these systems respectively (even if paywalls did not always allow immediate access to the content).
There were certa ..read more
Informatics Professor
10M ago
Keeping with my tradition for this blog, I am ending this calendar year with my retrospective on the past year and some musings looking forward. The number of postings I make to this blog continues to decline each year. It is not that I do not have a lot to say, but rather I do not seem to have as much time to say it.
One thought has been to move to a different medium, such as a podcast. While I do listen to a fair number of podcasts, I still myself seem to prefer my words to be written. If nothing else, text seems more accessible. Another option would be to switch to something like a Substack ..read more
Informatics Professor
1y ago
In my previous post, I related the case of an excellent model that predicted hospital readmission yet when used in the context of real-world effort to reduce admissions was not able to lower the rate.
Some new studies highlight this scenario again of excellent models and systems that, when studied, do not show real-world benefit. A couple papers in Annals of Internal Medicine find a similar scenario for one of the earliest uses of artificial intelligence (AI) to demonstrate success, which is computer-aided detection (CADe) of polyps during colonoscopy results. A systematic review of previous c ..read more
Informatics Professor
1y ago
Our news ands science feeds are so filled these days with everything artificial intelligence (AI), from large language models to their impacts on society, that we may miss important studies on other informatics topics, some of which may have lessons for AI. This is the case for a recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) on a hospital readmissions initiative (Donzé, 2023) and an accompanying editorial putting it in larger perspective.(Wachter, 2023)
Some may remember about a decade ago, when “data analytics” was the rage, and health insurance payors were noting with alarm the growing rate of ho ..read more
Informatics Professor
1y ago
I know that some people lament death by Powerpoint, but I find a speaker's slides generally valuable as both a listener and a speaker. Yes, many people (including me!) could do better with slides, but I find them useful. As a speaker, they help me keep track of everything I want to say, and drive home some points with visuals or reference lists. As a listener, I can keep track of what is being talked about, pursue any references I might be interested in further, and view graphics that often bring home points that words (especially spoken-only) do not.
My general practice when giving ..read more
Informatics Professor
1y ago
As most of my world knows, I stepped down as Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) at the end of last year. In addition to announcements made by OHSU, I let my world know with postings in this blog, on social media, and via some email lists.
I was gratified by the many nice accolades that I received but one thing was unsettling. This was those who wrote to congratulate me on my retirement. It was unsettling because I wanted to make explicit that I was not retiring, and instead was passing on the ..read more