Welcome from the Scientific Program Chair Mark A. Musen, MD, PhD

The AMIA 2003 Annual Symposium on biomedical and health informatics will be like no other. Redesigned from the ground up, AMIA 2003 will feature outstanding invited talks and panels throughout the meeting in addition to exciting contributed papers, panels, tutorials, workshops, posters, theater-style demonstrations, and partnerships in innovation sessions that you have come to expect from AMIA. These are more than cosmetic changes. In response to the conclusions of AMIA s Task Force on the Annual Symposium, we have re-thought nearly every aspect of the meeting in an effort to make the Symposium more topical, more lively, and more informative than ever before.

There will be presentations on many exciting topics, including the successes and failures of computer-based provider order entry (CPOE), the emerging national policy to develop a health information infrastructure, the use of robotics in clinical care, the UK e-Science initiative, and the role of informatics in responding to the SARS crisis earlier this year. Every moment of the meeting will be filled both with invited sessions and contributed sessions, tutorials, and workshops.

The Symposium will feature papers and posters that highlight cutting-edge work in biomedical informatics. A novel structure for differentiating presentations that deal with applied informatics from those that concentrate on the foundations of informatics will allow attendees to identify immediately those contributions that they believe will be of greatest professional value. As a result, AMIA 2003 will be more inclusive than any previous conference of its kind. AMIA 2003 will be the place where investigators come to learn about new advances in the science of informatics and where practitioners come to learn about the ideas that will drive the next generation of deployed information systems.

I believe you will share my enthusiasm for the innovations instituted to make AMIA 2003 the most stimulating and informative conference on biomedical informatics yet. I also hope you share my excitement for the scope and quality of the presentations that we will have to offer.

I hope that you will join me in experiencing these enticing opportunities and I welcome you to this 27th Annual Symposium on biomedical informatics.

Mark Musen
AMIA 2003 Scientific Program Committee Chair
 

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