Thursday, July 1, 2010

2010 AcademyHealth Final Thoughts

Good day blogosphere! Jordan here - giving some final thoughts to the AcademyHealth conference held this past week in the Cradle of Liberty, Boston. I, like Jeff, am in the PhD program in the Health Services Policy and Management department in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina.

The conference was filled with interesting sessions and had designated times for poster presentations and exhibits. The first day, I followed my main interest of Health IT and attended sessions that focused on that topic, however, the following days, I spread my wings and attended sessions dealing with primary care, prescription drugs, how to build an academic career, and palliative care.

I would be wide of the mark without mentioning a realization that Jeffery and I had dealing with the level of "geekdom" in which we had risen. Our last morning, (Tuesday) we found ourselves in a difficult predicament: at 8:00 AM, after dismantling and packing the posters to be shipped back to Columbia, we had not yet eaten breakfast and a session on hierarchical linear modeling was beginning. Thus we found ourselves in the uncommon position of deciding whether to eat now and risk missing past of the session, or going to the session and postponing our dietary needs. Like any good student of Dr. Probst, we chose the later. This ended up being a good decision, as this session truly did add to our statistical analysis knowledge and also adds to our "social gathering/small talk" repertoire.

In conclusion, the 2010 AcademyHealth conference, for me was a great experience. It offered an opportunity to see what my peers from other programs were researching, also it offered other networking opportunities with other professors and researchers. I look forward to next year's conference - to be held in Seattle.

No comments:

Post a Comment