A different kind of March Madness!
“What happens if someone yelled FHIR in an exhibit hall filled with 43,000+ Health IT and data science professionals?” This was the trending joke at HIMSS’18 in Vegas this March. An interesting tweet captured all the exercise attendees got while at HIMSS’18 – 382 miles walked (we basically walked from Durham to Atlanta), 737,713 steps traversed (climbed the empire state building 3 times), 255 floors climbed (ran 15 marathons), all just in 5 days at the beautiful Venetian . The excitement was palpable both live and in cyber space. An undercurrent of machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) was prominent in all forums and education sessions. I jotted down a few key lessons and takeaways: Data engineering is equally important or maybe more important than downstream modeling and algorithms. If taking on large AI projects, be prepared to invest resources in “data janitorial activities” to extract, clean, standardize and prepare data for analysis