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TUCS GP Student Sonja Leskinen's Travel Report from HICSS 2012
- Full name of the event: 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
- Place and date: Maui, Hawaii, USA. January 4-7 2012
- Type of event: Conference and a one day workshop
- My article:
- Title of paper: Veterinarian Work, Enhanced by Mobile Technology – An Empirical Study.
- Authors: Sonja Leskinen
- The scientific profile of the event: This conference had a very broad spectrum of topics within IS and mobile technology. The main tracks were everything from Collaboration Systems and technology, knowledge systems, e-government to decision technology, Mobile Technologies and service Science. These main tracks were divided into many minitracks. Simultaneously there could be 19 sessions in different conference rooms.
- Opinion on the best paper and its topic: I attended mostly the healthcare tracks, since I felt that I could learn most from these presentations, for my own research. The healthcare track seemed to have many American researchers, which was interesting, since USA has a very different healthcare system than what we have here in Europe. In USA the IS solutions presented were mostly concentrating on support for private nursing homes, private healthcare chains and maintenance of good health. The researches were also often funded by private healthcare companies. In Finland, and whole EU we are trying to get a one unified healthcare IS solution, since we rely much on public healthcare. In the US, private companies want to ensure that the customer comes back to their care, and does not switch to a competing healthcare company. The IS solutions therefore depended much on the fact that all the patient’s healthcare records are in one place and therefore the IS solutions also worked for both the company’s and the patient’s benefit. In my opinion the best paper, in view of my research was Strum Rahmans presentation of the paper “Public health informatics: Increasing use and access”
- Number of participants: Approx 1000 people were registered to the conference.
- Social events: Every evening there was some sort of social event on the hotel lawn. The largest was naturally the Luau dinner and show January 3rd.
- Touristic impressions: The conference venue was very nice. I stayed at the same hotel where the conference was. The hotel was rather expensive, but luckily we had special conference prices for the rooms. I went after the conference on fishing trip with some Aalto university people (both students & professors) we had a lot of fun, and I actually caught a large fish (15 kg). I believe that the Aalto university people will be very good professional contacts, and super fun friends!