During the week of May 30, 2005 I attended the spring session of Biomedical Informatics MBL/NLM Course as a Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The program is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine and is designed as a survey course of Biomedical Informatics taught by an all-star team of experts. Spring session instructors came from the following institutions: Duke, Harvard, NLM, Vanderbilt and Columbia, to name just a few. This is the fourteenth year the course was offered. Along with twenty lectures, totaling over thirty hours, the program included two hands-on sessions (web page design and developing web-based interfaces for databases.) The week also included some fun with social activities like a lobster bake, a party hosted by the program director, and a trip to Martha's Vineyard.

Sunset leaving Martha's Vineyard

The thirty Fellows, possessing a total of 45 advanced degrees, included:

• 14 health science librarians/administrators
• 8 physicians
• 1 administrator
• 2 information system professionals
• 3 nurses
• 1 veterinarian
• 1 educator

They came from diverse occupational settings including universities, profit and non-profit organizations, and one government agency. Eighteen states where represented along with one foreign country--Canada.

Eel pond with Swope dormitory in the distance (building on right)

The lecture topics included:

• Principles of Controlled Vocabulary
• Decision-Analytic Methods for Evidence Based Practice
• Clinical Information Systems
• Telemedicine
• The Visible Human Project
• Consumer Informatics
• Public Health Informatics
• Managing Technological Change
• The Internet: Reflections on What's Coming

Tour of the Marine Biological Laboratory-Viewing a squid (Loligo)

All Fellows were assigned to teams and each team presented their topic at the end of the week. The team's goal was to incorporate what had been learned during the week in a topic of their choice. The three projects included: The Born Identity (implanting RFID), Structured Queries Using Intelligent Data Systems, and Diagnostic Literature Information Portal: Gateway to Evidence-Based Diagnosis.

This year also saw the introduction of the first Biomedical Informatics Blog for communication among the Fellows during and after the course.

Gays Head lighthouse and cliff on Martha's Vineyard

I highly recommend this course to any health care professional who wants to learn more about biomedical informatics. Fellows have the opportunity to meet and interact with instructors who are leaders and pioneers in their fields.

• View a course outline
• View an overview of the course and access an application
• Participants Perceptions of the Influences of the NLM-Sponsored Woods Hole Medical Informatics Course