February 2024 Society Spotlight

Computerization of medicine can be a boon or a burden. The Clinical Informatics Special Interest Section brings together AHS members who want to help our specialty navigate these rapid changes in our practice.

As a growing number of us work in large, hospital-based practices, we frequently find ourselves facing complex electronic health record (EHR) changes, sometimes imposed with little input from ourselves or our specialty. Documentation is a driver for burnout in many physicians, and our pre-course at the upcoming 66th Annual Scientific Meeting, Putting Computers to Work for You: EMR and AI in Clinical Practice Workshop, tackles EHR with a hands-on workshop showing tips and tricks to make your EHR work for you. We also want to see integrable outcome measures in EHR, and our section worked with AAN on standardized measures for this goal in their 2020 Headache Quality Measurement Set.

Telehealth is part of our Section’s picture too. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in our 2017 Scottsdale pre-course, we provided a timely primer on telemedicine and during the pandemic, worked with the Primary Frontline Headache Care Section on a primary care telemedicine survey. We remain committed to improvements in this area as telehealth grows.

These days, clinical informatics means more than EHR and telehealth. We are in an unprecedented time of big data and artificial intelligence (AI), new forces that could radically change the practice of medicine and our EHR-based clinical research. We’ve first tackled the topic of AI in a 2023 Annual Scientific Meeting pre-course, in collaboration with the New Investigators and Trainees, Methodology, Design, and Statistical Issues, and the Headache in Primary Care Special Interest Sections with a paper on the way. Our upcoming pre-course this summer will address it too with a hands-on session using a chatbot to draft a letter of medical necessity. We are also producing a position statement on AI for AHS.

In the realm of big data, our Section’s 2017 pre-course included talks on patient registries, population health management, the accuracy of EHR-derived diagnoses, and application of a primary headache diagnosis algorithm to EHR. Our pre-course this summer will also address big data, with a hands-on exercise querying patient registry data.

If projects like these interest you, come join our Section where we work on real-world solutions for today’s practice!

Join the Clinical Informatics Special Interest Section here.

Dr. Hranilovich is an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Colorado, where she is part of the Children’s Hospital Colorado Headache Program. She is a child neurologist fellowship trained in headache at the Graham Headache Center in Boston. In addition to her clinical work, Dr. Hranilovich is engaged in NIH-funded translational research on the development of sex differences in headache during adolescence, assessing the influence of pubertal hormones on brain structure and function with magnetic resonance imaging. Dr. Hranilovich started attending AHS conferences at the encouragement of Dr. Kathleen Digre during her residency in Utah and was awarded the Frontiers in Headache Research Scholarship Award. Along the way, wonderful AHS mentors such as Drs. Digre, Loder, and Yonker have helped her access these and other opportunities such as speaking at the International Headache Academy, attending iHead at the International Headache Congress, working as an assistant editor at Headache, speaking through the REACH program, and selection for the 2021 Emerging Leaders Program.