SCAMC '94 "Transforming Information - Changing Health Care" November 5-9, 1994 Sheraton Washington Hotel, Washington, DC The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) solicits participation at its annual meeting, the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC). SCAMC is the premier conference in medical informatics in the United States. It provides a forum where those interested in medical informatics can present research findings, discuss development efforts, demonstrate software, attend tutorials, and hear leading experts from a wide range of professional groups discuss the current development and future impact of biomedical information systems. The theme of the Eighteenth SCAMC will be "Transforming Information, Changing Health Care". The Program Chair is Judy G. Ozbolt, Ph.D., R.N., School of Nursing, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. The Program Committee and Area Tracks are as follows: Evening Workshops - Reed Gardner, Ph.D. Poster Session/Demonstrations - Roy L. Simpson, B.D.N., R.N. Student Paper Competition - James J. Cimino, M.D. Tutorials and Panels - Mark Tuttle Tracks: Database Methods and Delivery - Christopher Chute, M.D., Ph.D. Image and Signal Processing - Alan Rowberg, M.D. Instructional Technology - Susan Sparks, Ph.D., R.N. Library Information Science - Mary Ellen Sievert, Ph.D. Networks and Standards - W. Ed Hammond, Ph.D. Nomenclature and Coding - James J. Cimino, M.D. Simulation, Modeling and Research Support - Joyce Mitchell, Ph.D. Support for Clinical Practice and Decision Making - Suzanne Henry, D.N.Sc., R.N. Support for Health Care Administration - Samuel Schultz, Ph.D. Advances in technology are producing dramatic growth in our ability to transform information from raw data to knowledge, decisions, and actions. In this environment, informatics has become a tool for changing health science and health care. It is not merely a means of doing more efficiently what would have been done in any case. Clinicians and biomedical researchers, armed with better information and greater access to knowledge than ever before, can confront difficult challenges in new ways. In basic science as in clinical studies, new approaches to acquiring, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting information enable researchers to discover knowledge for significant improvements in health and health care. Increasingly, health care practitioners have the ability to study their own behaviors and to compare them with the practice of others to identify more effective, less costly treatments. Standards and guidelines can be retrieved for consideration virtually wherever and whenever they are needed. But if current trends in medical informatics are rich with potential, they are also fraught with dilemmas. Transforming the information of health science and health care raises issues related to ethical, economic, and professional conduct. We must respect and protect privacy, information use, and responsibility for research, clinical judgment, and personalized care. With the increasing technological power to transform information comes the vital imperative for the medical informatics community to develop the innovations, implement the systems, and contribute to the policies that will change health care for the better. The Eighteenth SCAMC program will include a wide range of offerings: an opening plenary session addressing the role of informatics in health care, scientific paper presentations, poster presentations, informal evening workshops, software and information exchange services, and tutorials designed to meet specific needs of office-based clinicians, health-care professionals, educators, information systems developers, and medical informatics researchers. The program will be supplemented with sessions in which leaders from a variety of disciplines will provide overviews of the current status and future trends in health care information systems. These sessions will emphasize the effects of medical informatics on patient care, patient education, medical education, and clinical research. An extensive commercial exhibition area will provide attendees with the opportunity to meet commercial vendors and to examine a wide range of medical information management products of interest to AMIA members. Again this year, we will be able to offer to several of those companies who are in the SCAMC exhibit program an opportunity to participate in panel discussion reflecting the state-of-the-art. Panel discussions designed to compare and contrast different corporate approaches will be comprised of individuals from several companies and a "discussant" from the medical informatics community. The SCAMC Program Committee will plan these panel discussion and invite individuals to participate from those companies in our exhibit program. Under the aegis of its Awards Committee, AMIA provides two Best Paper awards at SCAMC for papers submitted to the regular scientific track of the Symposium. Papers of the finalists in the Student Paper Competition are not eligible for these awards. The judging is done by a special panel of referees assembled by the Awards Committee. The Award for Best Theoretical Paper is presented to the author or authors of the paper the judges believed best represents an advance in the theoretical foundation of medical informatics research. The second award, for Best Paper on an Application, is presented to the author or authors of a paper describing an application (usually a computer program or a hardware and software system) the judges consider to be a clear example of the utility of applied medical informatics in healthcare or biomedical research. You are invited to submit scientific papers; abstracts of proposed posters and software demonstrations; and proposals for panel discussions, evening workshops, and tutorials. Submissions will be judged by the Program Committee. The deadline for all submissions is May 10, 1994. For a complete "Call for Participation", which includes detailed instructions on layout and design, contact the AMIA office at 301-657-1291 (fax: 301-657-1296). Papers will be published in the SCAMC Proceedings and indexed in MEDLINE.