William Hersh, MD, Professor and Chair, OHSU
Blog: Informatics Professor
LinkedIn: William Hersh, MD
X: @williamhersh
It has been my practice in this blog in my last post of each year to reflect back on the year. Not so much to review everything that happened, but rather to give some general thoughts about what the field, my work in it, and this blog have accomplished and where things are going.
It has of course been another banner year for the informatics field, especially driven by the accomplishments and challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). Dating back to 2009, this blog has highlighted the big happenings of the field, starting with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, especially the educational opportunities enabled by it. We then moved on to making use of the data from the electronic health record (EHR) adoption that was incentivized by the HITECH Act that contributed to the vast quantities of data we now have and culminating in the advances of AI.
One aspect of my reflection this year concerns this blog itself. Readers can look to the right and notice that my number of postings has been declining in recent years. This does not reflect any change in my productivity but is more of a reflection of the uncertainty of my specific devotion to blogging. In the coming months, I will decide how long I wish to maintain this blog as a vehicle for sharing my thoughts about the field. I have not yet decided to cease blogging, but I am thinking about other uses of the time I have devoted to sharing my thinking.
One reason for my possibly moving away from this type of blogging is the emergence of so-called microblogging and other social media platforms. While I prefer the permanence of a regular blog like this, providing a much more distinctive history of my thinking, it is much easier to post insights to social media and have that serve as a record of my thoughts and interactions with others about them.
Another reflection on this past year concerns the direction of my country, the United States of America. Given the results of our 2024 elections, it is clear that enough of a majority of people, and electoral college votes, wish to change the direction of our country. This blog has never gone too far beyond healthcare and informatics. Not that I do not have a lot of views about politics and other happenings about the world, but rather I have aimed to keep this blog focused.
I will maintain these boundaries but note that the new leadership of health-related entities in the US could take our country in a profoundly different direction. Not only in healthcare but also in research, education, and more. I hope the worst of the new leadership’s tendencies will not be realized. I note a similarity to how I felt at the end of 2016.
These two issues – my thoughts on maintaining this blog and the changing political directions in the US – come together in my assessment of the new social media landscape. I have not written much in this blog in recent years about social media, but I had been making more use of Twitter now X, especially for scientific awareness (as opposed to my personal life, for which I am part of what my millennial children call the “Facebook generation”). I have now joined the exodus to BlueSky, and hope that it will be a place for scientific fields as well as rational news coverage.
Despite these uncertainties, I still maintain my optimism for the things that matter most in my life. My family, my friends, and the world of informatics that has brought tremendous career satisfaction and the joy of seeing so many colleagues, mentees, and others achieve success and provide great value through this field.
This article post first appeared on The Informatics Professor. Dr. Hersh is a frequent contributing expert to HealthIT Answers.