Paper accepted!

Today I found out that a paper I submitted with a group from my work has been accepted for presentation at a national conference in Phoenix this summer. Woo-hoo!

I haven't done very much academic work for the past 2 years. It's a nice feeling of accomplishment to be first author on a paper, especially since it was written in a marathon session just before the deadline. I had thought they only wanted the abstract until just about a day before the due date, and then discovered they wanted the entire paper. I buckled down and pushed through a 12-hour work day to get it done. There were several serendipitous occurrences that day that enabled me to finish it, including key people being willing to help me work on it after hours. I really do have fantastic co-workers. And as a side benefit, I now have the capacity to convert any document to PDF format. Whee.

If anyone's interested, the paper is about how we used a controlled reference terminology (SNOMED CT) to exchange computable data on patient allergies between the VA and the Dept of Defense. If you have insomnia, reading the entire paper could probably cure it, unless you happen to be one of the .001% of the population that really grooves on this sort of stuff.