American Medical Informatics Association Health Policy Conference

For more than 10 years, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Policy Invitational (API) has served as a platform to inform legislative, regulatory, and policy development related to health informatics. The objectives of the API meetings are to develop consensus recommendations on policy to improve health information technology (IT) for patient care, facilitate research, and manage the health of populations. These meetings bring together an interdisciplinary group including clinicians, researchers, public health experts, technology developers, patients, policy professionals, and informatics educators. These meetings are designed to enable attendees to share their areas of expertise and participate with colleagues in discussions to articulate the role of health informatics in developing next-generation Federal policies and research priorities.

The specific aims of the 2015 and 2016 AMIA Health Policy Invitational Meetings were as follows:

• Engage participants in topics through discussions and networking opportunities. 
• Articulate policy recommendations and a forward-looking research agenda. 
• Reach a broad audience beyond the conference via a dissemination plan. 
• Deepen understanding leading to action. 

The 2015 AMIA Policy Invitational, held in September 2015, was titled “Unlocking the Potential of Electronic Health Records (EHRs): How Policymakers Can Impact the Ongoing Evolution of EHRs.” Speakers from both the private and public sectors discussed their visions for how EHRs need to evolve to improve patient care, better manage populations, and better contain health care costs. Concurrent breakout sessions discussed questions and developed findings and recommendations, which were then synthesized and published as a manuscript: “Crossing the Health IT Chasm: Considerations and Policy Recommendations to Overcome Current Challenges and Enable Value-based Care.”

During the 2016 AMIA Policy Invitational, held in September 2016, participants examined issues related to the possibilities and pitfalls of reaching near universal adoption of EHRs in the U.S., and how this paradigm requires a reexamination of how clinical practice interacts with clinical research. The 2016 meeting, titled “Completing the Evidence Cycle: Reimagining the Research-Practice Relationship in a Post-Meaningful Use Era,” focused on how to leverage point-of-care activities and systems to improve clinical research, accelerate biomedical discovery, and improve the health of individuals and populations. A forthcoming manuscript will outlines policies to enable research at the point-of-care to improve local, regional, and national clinical research.