From June 26th-27th, the BIRT fellows attended the annual National Library of Medicine Informatics Training Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the fellows were selected to present posters or abstracts.

Dr. Goss presented his talk entitled "Evaluating Standard Terminologies for Encoding Allergy and an NLP-based Approach to Documenting Free-Text Allergies" at the Open-Mic session.

BIRT Postdoctoral Fellow Abhivyakti Kale's article, entitled "Adverse Drug Events caused by Serious Medication Administration Errors" was accepted by BMJ. The purpose of the study outlined in the article was to determine how often serious or life-threatening medication administration errors with the potential to cause patient harm (potential adverse drug events) result in actual patient harm (adverse drug events (ADEs)) in the hospital setting.

Peter J. Park, PhD, recieved a Young Mentor Award at the 2011-2012 Excellence in Mentoring Awards Ceremony at Harvard Medical School on June 5, 2012. The award, presented by the Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity and Community Partnership, recognizes gifted mentors with less than 10 years of service. To read more about the award and ceremony, click here.

The National Library of Medicine, a part of the National Institutes of Health, announced last week that it will be funding 14 five-year grants for research training in biomedical informatics, totaling more than $67 million. The BIRT program is excited to continue its outstanding program for at least another five years. To read the announcement in its entirety, click here.