Firehoses

I've spent the last week alternately sucking from, and spraying a firehose. I hope I gave as good as I got. Here was my itinerary for the week:

Monday

• Fly in
• Dinner with the organizers of the trip

Tuesday

• 2 hours on internal calls
• 2 hours meeting with the IT Director at Primary Children's Hospital
• 1 hour presenting the HL7 CDA and CCD to a Seminar of about 60 Informatics students and Staff at the University of Utah
• 3 hours meeting with a smaller student group working on various Public Health projects in the department

Wednesday

• 2 hours meeting with Informaticists at IHC
• 1 hours meeting various people from GE Healthcare
• 2 hours on a HITSP call taken in a cab, hotel room, and walking to my next meeting
• 1 hour meeting with a project team connecting researchers to the data available from Intermountain Healthcare, the University Health System, and the VA
• 1 hour getting an overview of a cool desktop devices that uses PCR to simultaneously identify multiple pathogens in about an hour, and actually understanding what it was doing! Thank you Scott, Molly and Kevin. Without your help this summer I would have been totally lost.

Thursday

• 2 hours on rounds at Intermountain Healthcare's new hospital
• 1 hour speaking on Standards Adoption
• 2 hours discussing clinical decision support, terminology and modelling with others from GE Healthcare
• Dinner with Stan Huff

Friday

• 3.5 hours meeting with a group of Informaticists at the VA
• Then I fly home.

My days started at 6:30 in the morning, and ended, well, just look at the time of this post. Salt Lake City is beautiful, and the mountains are covered in fresh snow that arrived Wednesday. While I wish I could have spent the weekend skiing, I haven't seen my family in a week, nor talked to my children (they have a schedule almost like mine this week, prepping for their appearance in a musical review in two weeks, and the time difference means that I constantly miss them when I call home).

I've been learning a great deal about public health and research this week, and been in the company of some extremely bright and educated people. I've also made a lot of new connections and spent time with a number of people that I don't usually see except at standards meetings. It's very interesting to see how these same folk take their standards expertise back into their day jobs.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about why standards are as hard as they are, and I'll share that in a subsequent post.

I'd like to thank Grant Wood of Intermountain Healthcare, Dr. Julio Facelli of the University of Utah, and Peter Haug of Intermountain Healthcare for making this trip possible. In addition, I'd like to thank Stan Huff, Joe Hales, Kathryn Kuttler, Susan Matney, Catherine Staes and Brett South, all of whom I found to be excellent hosts.