Hello colleagues in the Philippine Medical Informatics Society (PMIS), thank you for all your support and trust in me and my capabilities. For a period of two years, I will be serving PMIS as president, and, during this period, I will try my best to make our society more interactive and more conducive for intellectual exchange of ideas and knowledge in health informatics.
Medical Informatics is all around us–in our everyday health practice and in our own health promotion, it’s just that most of us miss out on the opportunities to utilize the principles and theories of med info in order to make clinical decisions more precise and accurate.
My vision is for PMIS to be pro-active to the changes that are happening around us, we are at the forefront of technology as it shapes and carves the tapestry that would later become the future of medicine. Advances in healthcare is unfolding so fast that most of the methods and techniques taught during our school days 10-20 years ago are getting obsolete and are replaced by more machines and software applications.
Handheld device software programs are proving to be of a big help and we are slowly growing more and more reliance as they gradually become our peripheral brains, and for some, these are already indispensable tools in their everyday healthcare practices.
My dear colleagues, let us make PMIS the medium of sharing of med info ideas and an avenue of learning new things. Let us all join together in being disciples or students of medical informatics where we all learn from each others’ experiences and knowledge. Be it a new handheld device, or an interesting software, let us all try to participate and share our thoughts and our ideas.
You might feel as if I am a very idealistic person, well, in some ways, I am, but in most instances, I am more of a realistic person–I am realistic and yet hopeful. I believe that if we are given a very suitable medium for communication, then we will all find ourselves participating in discussions and later on have our own ideas to share.
It will be a challenge that I will impose on myself to find a way to make communication easier for all of us, as geography should never be a barrier this day in age. And should anyone have any suggestions (like a PMIS Facebook), then just send me a message.
And with the geographical barrier to be non-existent in the coming days, and communication being more accessible, may I ask any members of PMIS who can volunteer a part of their time to help out in rejuvenating our society. Interested members can email me directly and we can find ways on how we can work around schedules and geographical or time constraints, and perhaps, be an officer of PMIS.
By the way, for those who do not know me personally, I am a practicing doctor and an administrator of a healthcare facility. My work takes up most of my time already, and yet, I am here, serving the society in any way I can (as my time permits). I am looking for others that can share the same enthusiasm in serving the society. Physical availability comes only second to having the heart for the society.
A membership form is in the process of being finished and will be distributed to all members for renewal of membership.
I am hoping that each member can volunteer a piece of their time, whether it be submitting an interesting article from the internet about med info, helping out with the development of our website, or by encouraging others to join the society.
Again, thank you all for your trust and confidence, and especially for the time you allotted in reading this letter.
Sincerely,
Erwin Brian Tan
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