I arrived at the Sheraton in Baltimore, MD, windblown and soaked, for the MedBiquitous conference on Monday night. My first workshop, Orientation to MedBiquitous, started at 9:00 on Tuesday. I found the orientation workshop extremely helpful. Valerie Smothers was the speaker and she covered the basics for people like me, who had no real idea about what MedBiquitous did. My second workshop, Introduction to SCORM, was less helpful. The workshops were three hours long and most of the SCORM workshop was full of technical talk and acronyms. I thought I was the only one to be having trouble keeping up so I didn’t ask many questions for fear of holding the whole group up, but when I talked more to people during the break, I found that almost everyone was clueless. I attended a SCORM 2.0 discussion after the introduction, which was an open forum for people to say what they wanted from the next version of SCORM. I was pleased to find that a lot of people said that they would have liked for things to be explained more in layman’s terms. It’s always reassuring to find out that I’m not a total moron.
On Wednesday, I attended a couple of the plenary sessions and an “unconference” on eFolios, and I checked out some of the “innovation demonstrations.” During the plenary sessions, I heard a lot of stuff about virtual patients, trusted agent, eFolios, information management… nothing we haven’t already had our finger on the pulse of at the Center. I’m happy to know that, but also slightly disappointed that I didn’t hear anything new. I was hoping for some juicy scouting tidbits… I even asked Bob if he had heard anything new and he just shook his head. The eFolio unconference was packed, but having an hour to talk about eFolios just wasn’t enough. There were tons of questions about them and lots of discussion to be had, but it got cut short because of time. A wiki was created and will be posted on www.MedBiq.org, though, so people can definitely go in and voice their opinions if they feel they weren’t heard. I didn’t find the innovation demonstrations all that innovative. They were mostly about data compiling and virtual patients. Some of the technology stuff was kinda cool, but since I don’t have a firm understanding of techie stuff, I couldn’t be impressed.
After the sessions, there was a reception and presentation of awards. You gotta love the hors devours at these things. Bob and I went to a dinner with some people from different organizations (AAMC, MedBiquitious, and others) to talk more about eFolios. I think some pretty cool things happened there, but I’m not entirely sure they’re discussable, so I’ll just leave it at this: I think we might have actually taken a step toward an actual pilot happening. :)
On Thursday, I attended a plenary on virtual patients and learned about the eVIP project that’s happening in Europe. It was awesome to see that so many schools are collaborating on this huge project. Visit http://www.virtualpatients.eu/ to find out all about it. There were some closing remarks, some made by our very own Bob, and then I was out the door to catch my train home.
MedBiquitous was a great experience for me, and from what I heard everyone saying, it’s been getting better and better every year. Maybe I’ll be brave enough to join some of the working groups next year!
