Project aims to share health information across state

It’s the year 2005. A health sciences student is attending a rural-health lecture by a nurse practitioner in the large auditorium of the Health Sciences Learning Center, recently completed on the western edge of campus.

Like all of the others in the room, her seat is equipped with connection ports for her portable computer. Using the computer’s large, high-resolution digital image screen, she inserts notes on the course’s lecture outline, and occasionally scribbles notes by hand in her notebook. Remote entry ports specific to each seat allow for the entire class, individually or jointly, to carry out short problem-solving tasks. And each seat is equipped for direct interaction with the lecturer; the entire audience can record each student question and teacher response.

That picture forms one small piece of the future of information sharing in the health sciences at UW–Madison. With the help of a strategic planning grant, the UW Health Sciences IAIMS Initiative is laying the groundwork for a well-coordinated and faculty-driven approach to more effective sharing of health information resources in the 21st century.

IAIMS – Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems – is a 15-year-old program funded by the National Library of Medicine to promote information technology in academic health science centers. The three university health sciences schools (nursing, medicine and pharmacy) are involved, along with the Health Sciences Library, the School of Veterinary Medicine, UW Hospital and Clinics, and the UW Medical Foundation.

Principal investigator Patricia Flatley Brennan, professor of nursing and of industrial engineering, will direct the project with co-principal investigators David DeMets, professor and chair of biostatistics and medical informatics, and Karen Dahlen, director of the Health Sciences libraries.

“Our first goal for the IAIMS project is to bring people together and solicit their views on how health sciences information resources – which exist separately all over campus and, in fact, all over the state – can be connected and better coordinated,” says Brennan. “This is not about developing and imposing a master plan from above. It is about identifying ways that all of us can benefit from a more coordinated approach to managing information.”

The strong tradition of faculty governance at Wisconsin has resulted in, among other things, a large collection of independent health information systems that are inaccessible to faculty and others outside the particular unit. While the UW health sciences are rich in information technology, they are less so in coordination. While that may have been a minor inconvenience in the past, it looms as a major shortcoming in the future.

“This is the right time for this kind of project for many reasons, but the two most significant are the opportunities we have in the new health facilities going up on campus and the growth of statewide training sites in all of the health sciences,” Brennan points out. “Training sites for the School of Nursing alone range from Rhinelander to Platteville and many points in between. We can’t realistically talk about the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ in the health sciences without better information bridges to our colleagues around the state.”

Creating the organizational structure in which those bridges will be built is the first priority of the IAIMS project at UW. Six committees, with broad representation from the various health sciences units, are charged with identifying current and future problems related to information technology. These six problem and priorities assessment groups will set the specific agenda for further planning; solution modeling teams will be responsible for reviewing and modeling solutions to the high-priority problems identified by the PPA groups. The IAIMS Coordinating Council, chaired jointly by Brennan and preventive medicine professor David Kindig, is the point at which problem identification and solution design meet.

The project leaders invite all faculty and staff to provide comments on the IAIMS project; those comments will be most helpful if received by Saturday, Dec. 4. Those interested may comment via e-mail to Brennan, pfbrenna@facstaff.wisc.edu, or through the IAIMS Web site. The site also contains the full text of the grant proposal.