Desiderata for High Quality AMIA Presentation Files

Abstract

The use of visual presentations to accompany talks has become the established standard in Medical Informatics conferences and has been the sine qua non at AMIA for many years. The most widely used software tool to prepare these presentations has been PowerPoint. AMIA has requested that researchers create their presentations using a standardized template and make them available ahead of time on the AMIA agenda website, typically as .pptx or .pdf files. In this paper, we are providing a few observations about uptake by the community, but, more importantly, we are making tentative steps towards answering questions about the quality of the visual presentation files. The paper starts with a review of four sets of guidelines for good PowerPoint presentations. It then provides basic descriptive statistics and structural observations about the 2019 AMIA presentations available on AMIA's website and concludes with a few recommendations for the future.