Kevin Johnson, MD, MS, Basam Alasaly, MS, and Yanbo Feng, MS – the director and members of Penn Medicine’s Artificial Intelligence for Ambulatory Care (AI4AI) Lab, respectively – attended the AMIA 2025 Clinical Informatics Conference in Anaheim, California. On May 22, the last day of the four-day conference, Alasaly presented “Capturing the Visit: Sociotechnical Ethnography Through Clinical Video in the Observer Repository,” introducing the Observer Repository to an audience of bioinformaticians, students, clinicians, and more.
Recording clinic visits is often hindered by a multitude of privacy, technical, and institutional barriers, making it especially difficult for individuals outside the medical field to access this data. The Observer Repository seeks to address this issue by providing a novel methodology for capturing clinical visits and de-identifying clinical audio-video data. So far, this growing repository contains more than 100 recorded visits across 8 different clinics.
By making clinic visit videos more accessible to researchers across disciplines, the Observer Repository fosters multidisciplinary collaboration aimed at helping develop innovative tools and interventions that can effectively reduce clinic documentation burden, enhance clinician-patient interaction, and improve primary care.
I still think about all the great conversations and connections made at the conference. The healthcare informatics community never fails to inspire!