The AMIA Annual Symposium is the primary forum for the presentation of research and development related to the structure and management of data, and the design, implementation and evaluation of information systems in the field of biomedical and health informatics. I don’t remember during my 26 years of attending the Annual Symposium when the interest in Biomedical and Health Informatics has been greater than now. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Meaningful Use has stimulated the need for and access to health information technology (HIT). The ultimate purpose of Meaningful Use is to use HIT to improve patient care, which has always been a goal of AMIA. Many of us in the AMIA family will be involved with Meaningful Use. It is critical that we "team-up" and share our experiences to answer the remaining implementation and use questions on what is working and where we are seeing problems and barriers so we can use the vast knowledge base held by AMIA members to make sure we see and can measure the benefits of HIT and prevent the potential unintended consequences.

This doesn't mean we should just focus on Meaningful Use and not keep doing what has made AMIA great. Our multidisciplinary field – in which we informaticians collaborate with computer scientists, clinicians, and others – has been impacted enormously by genomics, bioinformatics, pharmacology, consumer health, and public health. We need to continue to push HIT to new levels and use it to develop new methods to improve patient care, research, and public health. This knowledge and experience within AMIA is why its members are at the forefront of national HIT standards and policy committees and their input continues to be requested by government agencies and industry. AMIA's strength – the close collaboration and exchange of ideas between applied and foundational researchers – has generated many 'bench to bedside' translational collaborations and tools in the past. This symposium will again provide room for cross-fertilization and the development of new and intelligent methods for HIT implementation that are so urgently needed. Likewise, AMIA's larger footprint into global health presents a number of new opportunities and challenges to overcome.

While my work usually falls within the Applications track of AMIA, I am very cognizant that all my applications are dependent on good structure and data management in the electronic health record, enterprise data warehouse and a multitude of other ancillary databases. Thus, without a good data foundation and computer science methods and services, none of my programs would work. In the past few years, our presentations and submissions in the Foundations track have decreased. I hope we don't lose sight that both of these tracks are essential, dependent on each other and needed to improve health care.

New this year…the AMIA 2011 paper submissions page limit has been changed to 10 pages to provide authors with sufficient space to describe their research. The Symposium will also continue to include posters, panels, tutorials, workshops, theatre-style demonstrations, keynote speakers, special presentations by members of the American College of Medical Informatics, an "Informatics Year in Review", overviews of new findings from the Joint Summits on Translational Science and Public Health and examples of innovative collaborations with industry. The Awards program will recognize distinguished papers, student papers, posters and signature achievements in biomedical and health informatics. The Symposium will also continue the "journal-eligible" program, which was started in 2008 and allows paper submissions to be considered for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

I look forward to seeing you all in Washington DC this coming October and learning about the multitude of new and interesting studies and applications to improve healthcare.