By Clinical Informatics News Staff 

March 4, 2015 | The 2015 Medical Informatics World Conference will meet in Boston this May 4-5 to offer health IT professionals a chance to share their experiences in an evolving clinical landscape. As care providers turn to intelligent record systems, mobile and digital health platforms, and a host of other IT innovations to deliver quality care to patients, it’s more important than ever to share pitfalls and best practices. The maturing field of health IT is going through some growing pains, and barriers like a lack of interoperable systems, disparities in delivery, shifting federal requirements, and risk prediction will all be front and center in speakers’ presentations and workshops.

This year’s Medical Informatics World Conference will feature new tracks, including exclusive tracks for mobile health and for designing fully unified hospital IT architectures. As always, the event will spotlight the concerns of all stakeholders in medical informatics, including providers, payers, government, commercial innovators, and patients themselves.

Here’s a preview of some of the talks we’re looking forward to attending:

In the opening keynote session, Surgeon General nominee Phil Polakoff, American Medical Association President-elect Stephen Stack, and Beth Israel Deaconess CIO John Halamka all tackle the big picture of health IT reform, asking how delivery, regulatory models, and patient-provider relationships will have to evolve to take advantage of new technologies, and trying to separate fact from fiction in predicting the future of health IT. Monday, May 4, 8:00 am 

Tariq Abu-Jaber, VP of Medical Informatics at Harvard Pilgrim, breaks down the buzzword of big data into actionable practices for improving hospital operations, with new data sources and techniques for analysis. Monday, May 4, 11:10 am 

Neil Wagle, Medical Director for Population Health Management at Partners HealthCare, takes on the thorny but crucial issue of patient-reported outcomes, trying to measure and respond to the intangible health factors that matter most for patients’ quality of life. Monday, May 4, 11:10 am 

From the Kaiser Permanente hospital network, Terhilda Garrido, VP for Health IT Transformation, and Michael Kanter, Medical Director of Quality and Clinical Analysis, return after last year’s presentation on Kaiser’s widely deployed patient portal to report how offering patients more visibility into their care has continued to change hospital practices over the past year. Monday, May 4, 2:10 pm 

A panel discussion moderated by Daniel Sands of Harvard Medical School and the Society for Participatory Medicine considers the trend toward wearables and health apps, trying to discern where the “quantified self” could be a truly useful and relevant part of healthcare. Tuesday, May 5, 11:50 am 

Martin Reed of the Children’s Hospital, Canada takes on a case study in integrating novel data sources into a functional health IT workflow, discussing how his hospital added diagnostic imaging to both its computerized ordering and medical record systems, and its analytics architecture to support population health. Tuesday, May 5, 11:50 am 

For the closing keynote, Jonathan Weiner, Director of the Center for Population Health IT at Johns Hopkins, examines what new technologies will mean for future physicians and the medical workforce — particularly, how fewer health professionals will be able to serve more patients more effectively. Jason Burke of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine adds his perspective as an advocate for intelligent, holistic IT architectures, showing how medical informatics can scale up to serve whole populations. Tuesday, May 5, 1:40 pm