Third Term

I'm starting my third term of Informatics classes at OHSU.  Last term I spend on two classes: Medical Decision Making, and Project Management.    My expectations about the classes were flip-flopped, because I though the first one would be more difficult for me than it was, and I though the second would be less difficult because I've been managing projects for 30 years.  I was wrong.

The first one was aided by the fact that I do math for fun, and logic is the mainstay of my work, so learning formulas and ways to evaluate them and assign probablistic values to them was something I do all the time, and I also have played around with Markov Chains, so none of the material was new, just the ways to apply it (which was extremely valuable).

On the Project Management side, there's a ton of stuff that I have already "made lean" in the way I manage projects, but recalling the original process that has had the extra stuff cut away was extremely useful.  I may have cut it away because I didn't need it in one environment (e.g., the org chart), but in other projects its extremely useful because the material isn't the same each time.

This term I'll be taking Quality Management and Consumer Health Informatics.  I won't make any predictions about which will be easy or hard but I suspect both will be engaging and challenging.  I hope to use some of my FHIR / HQMF work as part of my class project in Quality Management.  On the Consumer Health Informatics side, I got a bit of a jump in my first term because I did a term paper on the topic, but that doesn't mean I'm at all an expert, maybe just a bit ahead of the class on SOME of the material.

I'm hoping to avoid a repeat of last two terms where I spent final's week on the road.  I already have a good start.  Instead, I spent opening week between Bangalore, India and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

   Keith