EPtalk by Dr. Jayne 2/27/25

I’m deep into my HIMSS prep this week, figuring out what vendors I need to visit and of course which booths will be having the best happy hour offerings. I was excited to see that my friends at Edifecs will be running their #WhatIRun campaign again this year. The initiative highlights all the things that women “run” in the world, whether it’s meetings, departments, companies, projects, or carpools.

Especially for those of us in healthcare IT, it’s important to remember that women play a role in 80% of all healthcare decisions made, but only fill 19% of C-suite roles in healthcare IT organizations. If you’re at HIMSS, stop by and see them in booth 2451. If you’re not able to attend, share your story with the #WhatIRun hashtag and Edifecs will donate $1 to the brightpink.org in efforts to focus on women’s health.

I also downloaded the HIMSS app today after receiving notifications via email about people who were messaging me through the HIMSS platform. I get what they’re trying to do with their one-stop shop for communications, but it’s annoying. I don’t have time to keep up with appointments coming in through email, text, and now from the HIMSS app. I wish that colleagues would just stick with whatever usual method we use to communicate if they want to reach out about a HIMSS meeting. I live and die by my Outlook calendar, which is the single source of truth for where my body needs to be and what my mind needs to be doing at any given time.

I was interested to see that the HIMSS opening reception is being hosted at an outdoor venue this year. Although hopefully it will make for easier chatting than the traditional “try to yell over the music and entertainment in a cavernous ballroom” experience, the forecast for Monday is looking cloudy and cool. Temperatures for the rest of the event will runn mid-40s to mid-60s for us Fahrenheit-using folks.

Other than including comfortable but sparkly shoes that I’ve had picked out for weeks, I have no idea what I plan to pack. A fair number of my customers have adopted the low-key tech wardrobe with jeans, sneakers, and fleeces or other jackets. Several still tend to wear full business dress. We will have to see what inspiration the closet and the forecast give me. I think nostalgically about the days in my past life when I could just wear scrubs and running shoes every single day and no one batted an eye.

I’m still digging through the lists of sessions and presentations to figure out where I’ll be spending most of my time. I’ve long complained about the length of the lead time for HIMSS educational presentations, which results in the risk that content is outdated before it ever gets presented. I’ve identified quite a few good sessions to add to my list, but unfortunately, it seems like there are several good ones that are scheduled at the same time and then long gaps without anything in which I am particularly interested. I bought the cheapest badge this year so I won’t be getting the on-demand versions, but in the past, the quality has been low so it seemed like the right decision at the time.

Pet peeve of the week: One of my consulting clients asked me to sit in on a vendor demo this week as they begin the process to solve a pesky business problem. We were minutes into the demo when the sales rep bungled a couple of industry terms and company names. Rule of thumb: if you’re going to name drop, make sure you know how to pronounce the names of companies and products that you’re citing. If you’re going to use clinical terminology, make sure you are able to pronounce the words. Appearing as if you don’t know what you’re talking about is one of the fastest ways to lose credibility during a pitch. There are plenty of references out on the interwebs to help you learn how to pronounce pesky words. And for company names – if you’re in doubt, pronounce it the way the CEO says it. YouTube is your friend here.

A friend of mine who knows I’m a clinical informaticist but also knows I’m a huge fan of reading sent me this interesting piece on the intersection of ChatGPT and literature. It reviews recent work that looked at whether GPT was better at reproducing the style and tone of male authors than female ones, as well as follow up work that looked at other attributes of GPT-generated writings. The authors ultimately looked at 10 well-known 19th-century authors including Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and others. A generative AI tool was asked to create new works in the style of each. The authors noted that prompt writing was somewhat challenging, but were able to move forward. They also identified ways to classify the writings based on sentence length, selected words, and other factors.

Ultimately they were able to develop a model that was 99% accurate in identifying synthetic versus author-created texts. Interestingly, they also found that GPT was surprisingly good at imitating Mark Twain, which a higher proportion of synthetic writings being mischaracterized as authentic. The researchers plan to explore this further in a future phase of the project, but hypothesize that the phenomenon was caused by the fact that there isn’t as much Twain-adjacent material online compared to the other authors. Hopefully my friend will keep an eye out for the future research since it’s nearly impossible to keep up with everything going on in the world of GPT.

I recently completed a series of novels that seemed to have a break in the middle where it felt like a ghostwriter stepped in and the editors were AWOL. Characters changed names, plot elements morphed, and there was a lot of confusion. Was it GPT or just sloppy writing and editing? I wasn’t the only one who noticed the change, based on some online review sites. We may never know, but the idea of GPT did cross my mind.

Would you want to read a GPT-created novel in the style of one of your favorite writers? If so, what writer would be on the top of your list? Leave a comment or email me.

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