The More AMIA Changes, the More It Stays the Same . . .

Right at this very moment, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2022 Annual Symposium is underway in Washington, D.C., and we encourage you to visit NLM @ AMIA 2022 for updates on NLM’s products and programs. Now this may sound quite familiar to those of you who have attended AMIA annual symposiums in Washington, D.C., and other major cities over the past 30 years, but this year it is different. And yet, it is the same.

What’s the same? Well, for me and almost 3,000 other attendees, AMIA is our professional home. Through meetings and conversations, journal articles and webinars, and a host of new events and meetings, members build their knowledge about biomedical and health informatics, share that knowledge with colleagues, and advance the health of the public through informatics. We have built friendships, watched babies be born and grow into adults (including my son Conor), and grieved the loss of great leaders in the field. Colleagues have debated the wisdom of electronic health records that may have inadvertently contributed to clinician burnout and expanded the scope of our design and deployment efforts to encompass tools useful to consumers and language reflective of the diversity of society.

AMIA has welcomed young people into informatics and sponsored high school-student participation in national meetings. Special events now include rapid response to public health threats, special interest meetings for women in informatics, and expanded attention to diversity and inclusion. The fall symposium provides an opportunity for formal and informal mentoring, a quick hug with an old friend, and a reunion of those with whom we studied the basics of the field.

And yet, over 30 years, many things have changed! First and foremost, AMIA as an organization has grown, engaged new leadership, and developed new special interest groups. These each change the tenor of the meeting by adding new events to an already rich and attractive suite of offerings and bringing like-minded people together. The ideas shared and the research reported through the annual symposium have morphed throughout the years; now artificial intelligence takes center stage, tempered by thoughts of transparency and equity. A larger number of panels and industry sessions reflect the rapidly changing landscape of informatics. Electronic posters and smartphone apps take the place of what once were paper posters displayed in long corridors of bulletin boards and a three-inch-thick compilation—dare I say phone book size—of all the papers to be presented at the sessions.

And of course, the pandemic changed both everything and nothing. AMIA still hosted an annual symposium and participants still gathered, at least over video chat! Throughout the pandemic, AMIA offered virtual and hybrid conferences—this is the first annual symposium completely in person since 2019 and boy, was I ready for it!

So, rejoice with us—our annual touchstone of gathering for the science of biomedical informatics and the social support of friends and colleagues continued! Please plan to join us in 2023 and see for yourself what it is like!