Today, we sat down and began to discuss our goals for our project, including defining what an EGC is, deciding whether our specific EGC fits those requirements, breaking down how sustainability works in regards to health informatics and underlining our next steps. We then synthesized our individual definition of an EGC that we gleaned from our research over the past week. We agreed an Engineering Grand Challenge is a call to action for engineers across the world. It is a challenge with both technical and cultural aspects which requires a solution that considers sustainability. To tackle these problems, a large amount of energy, effort, and people are needed and if these challenges are resolved, it will improve the quality of life for everyone around the world. Based on this definition we agree that advancing health informatics is an EGC as it is both culturally and technologically difficult to approach but will have many global benefits.
For the task of advancing health informatics, the issue of sustainability comes with the desire to provide and receive a constant stream of information. Furthermore, the technology itself must be consistent and up-to-date across different systems and offices. Whether we can maintain a system that works efficiently across the board is the biggest hurdle.
We also decided that, for the sake of clarity, we want to divide our research, presentation, and paper into the three subcategories of health informatics: acquisition, management, and use. We assigned management to Julia, use to Sam, and acquisition to Bo. Each member will write their portion of the essay and then the whole group will edit the paper as a whole for cohesiveness. By grouping our information into easier to understand segments, it will strengthen our argument, for having our audience completely in tune with what we argue will increase our persuasiveness. We also agreed that this is how we will present our powerpoint. Then, every member will have an equal speaking opportunity and be knowledgeable.
Meeting for tonight rescheduled to take place on Thursday 1/24 at 8:00pm in CoorsTek.
Each member will begin specifically researching their portion of the essay to share ideas at the next meeting. The following meeting will be next Tuesday 1/29 before IDEAS.
Written by Julia
Advance Health Informatics 
Hi team! I really like the way you are discussing your goals and defining terms (EGC, sustainability). You are showing clear evidence of systems thinking and critical analysis! Woo-hoo. You’re also doing a great job of delegating tasks to individuals so that everyone clearly understands their personal responsibilities and their impact on the group. One caution, though, is to clearly write your argument before dividing up the different parts of the paper. Read the prompt carefully: we want to see you support your argument with evidence. Of course, part of the paper will serve to orient the reader to the topic (acquisition, management, and use), but we really want to see an argument backed up by evidence, as you saw in the Hardin and Sandler readings. The argument doesn’t need to be profound, but we do want you to take a stand. Overall, I think you’re making good progress and appreciate your plan for a follow-up meeting on Thursday night. Good luck! -SR
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