Chair’s Message
We are moving toward our vision with a number of activities across our various programs. We have updated our strategic plan in response to the 10-year academic program review that we recently completed. For our research-oriented MS and PhD programs, we have recently added a specialization in Data Science. We are completing a curriculum revision for our on line applied clinical informatics MS which will be effective Fall 2020. The work of our fellows in the clinical informatics fellowship program has received plaudits from clinical administrators and faculty, and we are currently recruiting a new faculty member in our department to assist with this program (view position description). We are also recruiting a faculty member in medical education to start Summer 2020 (view position description). This is the beginning of a new cycle of admissions to our graduate programs, and we look forward to another productive year, and new growth in our department.
Cordially,
Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, MD
Chair and Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education
Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter
February 17-February 21, 2020
PUBLICATIONS
Bowen, J., Klaich, A., Chen, A. T., Rockhill, C. (accepted). Satisfaction of patients and implementers utilizing technology-based Social Emotional Learning interventions in a youth inpatient psychiatric setting. Poster to be presented at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference 2020.
Chen, A. T., Ornelas-Mendoza, M., Rockhill, C. (accepted). Examination of heart rate variability among psychiatric youth inpatients utilizing a technology-based Social Emotional Learning biofeedback intervention in an inpatient setting: data collection and analysis challenges, initial results and next steps. Poster to be presented at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference 2020.
Sharma, R. S., Tsui, S., Chen, A. T. (accepted). Involving stakeholders in the design of an interactive guide for patients with advanced cancer. Poster to be presented at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference 2020.
Ng, C., Shirts, B. H., Chen, A. T. (accepted). Facilitating family communication about genetic testing through ConnectMyVariant, an educational website: Development and preliminary usability assessment. Poster to be presented at AMIA Clinical Informatics Conference 2020.
Kim, S, Appelbaum, NP, Baker, N, Bajwa, NM, Chu, F, Pal, JD, Cochran, N, Bochatay, N. Patient Safety over Power Hierarchy: A Scoping Review of Healthcare Professionals’ Speaking-Up Skills Training. Accepted to Journal of Healthcare Quality.
February 10-February 14, 2020
PUBLICATIONS
William R. Kearns, Nai-Ching Chi, Yong K. Choi, Shih-Yin Lin, Hilaire Thompson, George Demiris. A Systematic Review of Health Dialog Systems. Methods of Information in Medicine. 2020.
William R. Kearns, Neha Kaura, Myra Divina, Cuong Vo, Dong Si, Teresa, M Ward, Weichao Yuwen. A Wizard-of-Oz Interface and Persona-based Methodology for Collecting Health Counseling Dialog. In: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors.
February 3-February 7, 2020
PUBLICATIONS
LeRouge, C., Sangameswaran, S., Frogner, B., Snyder, C., Rubenstein V. L., Kirsh, S., Sayre, G., The Group Practice Manager in the VHA: A View From the Field, Federal Practitioner 37(2).
UPCOMING GENERAL EXAM
Will Kearns
Friday, February 14 at 9:30 am; South Lake Union, Orin Smith Auditorium
Title: Enhancing Empathy: Toward Emotionally Aware Conversational Agents for Caregivers
Abstract: Chronic health conditions affect one in four children in the United States. Their family caregivers are more likely to experience mental health symptoms related to anxiety and depression. These symptoms can reduce the ability of caregivers to provide treatment according to clinical recommendations which leads to poorer health outcomes and increased risk of hospitalization for the child. Yet, these conditions often go undiagnosed and untreated since caregiver mental health status is not part of standard practice. This contributes to health disparity between families with regular access to care and those without. While telemedicine solutions have the potential to increase access to mental health therapy, the cost of these services may be prohibitive for many patients.
Health dialog systems (HDS) can help to scale mental health therapy to more patients at reduced cost. Already, HDS have seen increased adoption by patients, hospital systems, and researchers due to a confluence of advancements in machine learning and the ubiquity of high-performance hardware that supports real-time speech recognition, high-fidelity text-to-speech, and semantic understanding of natural language. Commercial digital assistant platforms have made HIPAA-compliant HDS accessible to patients that allow them to update their care team on their recovery progress, track their blood sugar, and receive educational health information. HDS have no practical scale limitations and can be delivered as a mobile application to increase global access to on-demand mental health support. However, maintaining patient engagement with these systems will require addressing the current inability for HDS to achieve theory of mind and to respond empathetically based on this understanding.
The central hypothesis of this work is that recent advances in knowledge-based language models can be leveraged to achieve clinical empathy in HDS by inferring and verifying the mental states of a patient in health counseling dialog and generating responses conditioned on these states to improve rapport and provide relevant therapeutic content. Further, this work develops and evaluates a tool and framework to support health practitioners in training statistical HDS that support this capability, thus relieving the burden of maintaining rule-based systems that have been superseded by data-driven approaches in the general domain.
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The New York Times Data Editor, Amanda Cox, will be speaking at UW May 7th. Topic will be on communicating data and models to mass audiences.
Registration opens March 4th. These talks tend to book quickly (like a few days after tickets are offered) so it is worth announcing now so people can mark their calendars for March 4th.
https://grad.uw.edu/public-lecture-series/amanda-cox/
January 22-January 31, 2020
NEWS
In early 2019, the Clinical Sequencing Evidence-Generating Research (CSER) consortium’s U01 projects and the coordinating center (CC; P.I.s: Jarvik, Veenstra, Nickerson, Fullerton, Tarczy-Hornoch) signed a data use agreement (DUA) outlining processes and procedures for the sharing of data within CSER for scientific projects. Building on this effort, and to further support the sharing of data within, the CSER CC requested and received a multi-year supplemental award in late 2019 to manage the harmonized outcomes and measures, and sequence data, and to have the CC serve as a data coordinating center (DCC). The proposed ecosystem is one of the first National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) programs to leverage the Genomic Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-space (AnVIL) resource for data deposition, storage, and retrieval. University of Washington investigators Kathleen Muenzen and David Crosslin are leading these efforts at the CSER CC.
PUBLICATIONS
MONROE-WISE, Aliza et al. Improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Knowledge and Skills to Develop Health Research Capacity in Kenya. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, [S.l.], v. 11, n. 3, dec. 2019. ISSN 1947-2579. Aliza Monroe-Wise, John Kinuthia, Sherrilynne Fuller, Matthew Dunbar, David Masuda, Elisha Opiyo, Betty Muchai, Christopher Chepken, Elijah Omwenga, Robert Oboko, Alfred Osoti, Daniel Masys, Michael H Chung
Available at: <https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/ojphi/article/view/10323>. Date accessed: 30 Jan. 2020. doi:https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v11i3.10323.
Shefali Haldar, Sonali R. Mishra, Yoojung Kim, Andrea Hartzler, Ari H Pollack, Wanda Pratt. Use and Impact of an Online Community for Hospital Patients. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz212
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Population Health Initiative: Feature Wall Content for the Hans Rosling Center for Population Health
A key component of the new Hans Rosling Center for Population Health – opening this summer – is telling the story of the major advances, achievements, and contributors to improvements in population health (i.e., human health, environmental resilience, social and economic equity) that have occurred both domestically and internationally.
We’re hoping to secure broad input to help show how each of the university’s disciplines have contributed to improvements in health and well-being. This input will be converted to short passages of text that are laser engraved on wooden blocks that make up the feature walls next to main building entrances.
Feedback is welcome from all faculty, students, and staff of the UW. The survey will close at 5 p.m. (Pacific) on Tuesday, February 18, 2020. More information can be found by visiting our website (link) or the survey itself (https://is.gd/rosling_center).
January 20-January 24, 2020
NEWS
| Please join the University of Washington School of Medicine at the Western Group on Educational Affairs (WGEA) annual meeting, March 28-31, 2020, at the beautiful Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, CA.
WGEA Conference Co-Chairs: Lynne Robins, Ph.D., Joshua Jauregui, M.D. This conference will celebrate the many ways WGEA members are working toward “Finding Common Ground” within and across communities. Our theme borrows principles from improvisational theater to provide a language for discussing the attitudes and skills that allow collaborative exchange and advancement within medical education. https://www.wgea2020.com/ |
January 13-January 17, 2020
NEWS
UWFM Research Section Head Matthew Thompson and colleagues awarded funding by Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. Kari Stephens, PhD, Meliha Yetisgen, PhD
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Mittler, John E., James T. Murphy, Sarah E. Stansfield, Kathryn Peebles, Geoffrey S. Gottlieb, Neil F. Abernethy, Molly C. Reid, Steven M. Goodreau, and Joshua T. Herbeck. “Large benefits to youth-focused HIV treatment-as-prevention efforts in generalized heterosexual populations: An agent-based simulation model.” PLoS Computational Biology 15, no. 12 (2019).
Byun J, Schliep KC, Peterson CM, Backonja U, Taylor RN, Stanford JB, Allen-Brady KL, Smith KR, Buck Louis GM. Adiposity and endometriosis severity and typology. The Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology (in press). 2020. doi: 10.1016/j.jmig.2020.01.002
Cheng SC, Backonja U, Buck B, Monroe-DeVita M, Walsh E. Facilitating pathways to care: A qualitative study of the self-reported needs and coping skills of caregivers of young adults diagnosed with early psychosis. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing (in press). 2020. doi: 10.1111/jpm.12591.
Ari H. Pollack, MD; Wanda Pratt, PhD. Association of Health Record Visualizations With Physicians’ Cognitive Load When Prioritizing Hospitalized Patients. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2758744
Timothy Bergquist, Vikas Pejaver, Noah Hammarlund, Sean D. Mooney & Stephen J. Mooney. Evaluation of the secondary use of electronic health records to detect seasonal, holiday-related, and rare events related to traumatic injury and poisoning. BMC Public Health volume 20, Article number: 46 (2020) https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8153-7
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BIME Happy Hour “Post-Holiday Blues” theme
Thursday, January 23, 5:00 p.m., South Lake Union, Reception Lounge
Please join us for our monthly departmental BYOB Happy Hour, held every third Thursday of the month. As always, please bring your own beverage; snacks will be provided. Games and Prizes!
January 6-January 10, 2020
NEWS
Bryant T. Karras, MD, Washington State Department of Health and Thomas H. Payne, MD, UW Medicine ITS/University of Washington are on the program committee … there may be student volunteer opportunity will let you know as soon as we hear.
Registration Open: AMIA 2020 Clinical Informatics Conference
The AMIA 2020 Clinical Informatics Conference (CIC) registration is now open! This is your chance to save with your members-only discount through March 26.
CIC, May 19-21 in Seattle, is where all members of the health care team come together. Our collective goal is to advance healthcare systems driven by data, evidence, and best practice with the explicit purpose of creating better health information technologies.
Last year’s conference was our largest to date, and this year we received nearly twice the number of submissions!
The program committee is working to create the best possible conference experience.
Register now to get your exclusive savings!
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
J. Sabin. How we fail black patients in pain | AAMC. Half of white medical trainees believe such myths as black people have thicker skin or less sensitive nerve endings than white people. An expert looks at how false notions and hidden biases fuel inadequate treatment of minorities’ pain. www.aamc.org
Tsai, G., Chen, A. T., Garrett, L. T., Burke, W., Bowen, D. J., & Shirts, B. H. (in press). Exploring relatives’ perceptions of participation, ethics, and communication in a patient-driven familial genetics study. Journal of Genetic Counseling.DOI: 10.1002/jgc4.1215
Conway, M., Hu, M., Benson, R., Zhu, S.-H., Chen, A. T. (accepted). Tracking the evolving relationship between tobacco, marijuana, and e-cigarettes using Reddit. Poster to be presented at Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT) 2020 Annual Meeting. New Orleans, Louisiana.
Lor M, Backonja U. Visualizations to Support Self-Management of Chronic Diseases in the Community: A Systematic Review. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing. 2019 [Epub ahead of print]. doi: 10.1097/CIN.0000000000000583.
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BIME Happy Hour “Post-Holiday Blues” theme
Thursday, January 16, 5:00 p.m., South Lake Union, Reception Lounge
Please join us for our monthly departmental BYOB Happy Hour, held every third Thursday of the month. As always, please bring your own beverage; snacks will be provided. Games and Prizes!
December 30, 2019-January 3, 2020
NEWS
The National Library of Medicine announced a $2.8 million grant to fund the UnBIASED project, which is led by Andrea Hartzler, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and co-director of the Clinical Informatics and Patient-Centered Technologies program. Janice Sabin, Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and Wanda Pratt, Information School are Co-Investigators on the Grant. This research team will analyze patient-doctor communication to detect and provide feedback on implicit biases.
The project will use social signal processing, a computational approach that detects subtle forms of bias that are typically invisible. For example, talk time, interruptions and body movements from healthcare providers might differ based on a patient’s race, gender or socioeconomic status.
By using technology to detect such biases, the researchers hope to provide feedback to clinicians and patients, reducing disparities as a result. They aim is to lay the foundation for training resources that will ultimately enhance the quality of care by improving communication between patients and doctors.
https://huddle.uwmedicine.org/news-briefs
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Messinger, G. Luo, and R. Deterding. Machine Learning in Asthma. Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
Massie, J.P., Cho, D.Y., Kneib, C.J., Jacob R Burns, Crowe, C. S. Lane, M., Shakir, A., L Sobol, D.L., Satterwhite, T., Sabin, J., Sousa, J.D., Rodriguez, E.D., Morrison, S.D. (2019) Patient Representation in Medical Literature: Are We Appropriately Depicting Diversity? Plast Reconstr Surg Glob Open 2019;7:e2563; doi: 10.1097/online 26 December 2019.)
December 16-20, 2019
NEWS
In collaboration with the iSchool, the new undergraduate specialization in Biomedical and Health Informatics has been approved! For undergraduates majoring in Informatics, they may choose a specialization, or track, that requires four BHI-specific courses. In the agreement with the iSchool, this program is administered via the iSchool, but it is jointly branded, and BIME faculty will teach half of these BHI undergraduate courses.
We have been working towards this for a while now, and it’s nice to see if formally approved. Stay tuned for more announcements and advertisements about this program from the iSchool.
Walter H. Curioso, Ph.D., M.D., M.P.H., Affiliate Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the UW, has been selected to be part of the Roster of Experts in Digital Health by the World Health Organization.
Andrea Hartzler is a co-investigator on a recently funded ITHS Collaboration Innovation Award entitled “Feasibility of chatbot‐facilitated social needs screening in the Emergency Department”. She will collaborate with PI Gary Hsieh (HCDE) and Herbie Duber (Emergency Medicine) on stakeholder engagement, workflow assessment, user acceptability, and quality metrics for clinical implementation.
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Curioso WH. Building Capacity and Training for Digital Health: Challenges and Opportunities in Latin America. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2019;21(12):e16513. PMID: 31850849. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2196/16513
Coley YR, Boggs JM, Beck A, Hartzler AL, Simon G. Defining success in measurement-based care for depression: a comparison of common metrics. Psychiatric Services Published Online:18 Dec 2019 https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.201900295
Nikita Pozdeyev, MD, PhD, Arpit Patel, MD, Paul S. Pottinger, MD, Michael Leu, MD, MS, MHS, Thomas H Payne, MD. “Adherence to recommended post-splenectomy immunizations to reduce the risk of sepsis – the University of Washington experience”. Accepted for the publication in the American Journal of Medical Quality.
December 9-13, 2019
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Jimmy Phuong was invited to give an e-lightning talk with an electronic poster at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2019 conference entitled, “Information needs for supporting population health researchers in hurricane and flood disasters” [link]. Coauthors for the talk include Christina Bandaragoda, Shefali Haldar, Sean Mooney.
Using an Innovative Discussion Platform to Give Voice to Aging-Related Experiences: A Pilot Study Andrew K. Teng, MS, BS; Soojeong Han, AGNP-BC, RN; Shih-Yin Lin, PhD, MPH; George Demiris, PhD; Oleg Zaslavsky, PhD, MHA, RN; Annie T. Chen, PhD, MSIS
Emerging Smart Home Technologies to Facilitate Engaging With Aging Yong K. Choi, PhD, MPH; Amanda Lazar, PhD; George Demiris, PhD, FACMI, FGSA; Hilaire J. Thompson, PhD, RN, ARNP, AGACNP-BC, FAAN, FGSA
The WRITE Stuff: A Rural Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship Addresses Workforce Needs. Misbah Keen, MD, MBI, MPH; Danielle Gunder, Med; Toby Keys, MA, MPH; Douglas Schaad, PhD; David Evans, MD DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/jrmc.v2i5.2103 Journal of Regional Medical Campuses, Vol. 2, Issue 5 (2019)
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JAMA Open Day: Supporting Open Access
On Wednesday January 22 from 9am-1pm the Health Sciences Library will host a JAMA Network Open Day to introduce the Puget Sound research community to open publishing and provide knowledge associated with publishing for the JAMA Network Open Journal.
Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington is the editor of JAMA Open and the keynote speaker. Other topics with presentations will include: Open Researcher and Contributor (ORC)ID, Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), Clinical Trials.gov, and the new PubMed.
Heidi Krueger was awarded First Place for the third time in the 3rd Annual “George Demiris Commemorative Dessert Contest” during the BIME Holiday Party.
December 2-6, 2019
NEWS
Gang Luo’s lab obtained a subcontract from the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System to support a PhD student in Dr. Luo’s lab for the next few quarters to help the VA PI develop a deep learning model to predict no shows and walk-ins at VA.
Kari Stephens, PhD, is a co-investigator with Dr. Matthew Thompson on a new grant just awarded from the Moore Foundation to develop a tool to improve early diagnosis of lung cancer using EHR data and data science methods. https://www.moore.org/article-detail?newsUrlName=new-projects-aim-to-develop-clinical-quality-measures-to-improve-diagnosis
AMIA NEWS
Hannah Burkhardt was the winner of the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Student Innovation Award, Burkhardt, H. A., Subramanian, D., Mower, J., & Cohen, T. (2019). Predicting Adverse Drug-Drug Interactions with Neural Embedding of Semantic Predications. https://hannahburkhardt.github.io/
YiFan Wu was a finalist in the Student Design Challenge, https://www.amia.org/amia2019/student-design-challenge
Anne Turner’s student, Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang was a finalist in the Student Paper Competition.
UPCOMING GENERAL EXAM
Lauren Snyder
Monday, December 9 at 10:30 am; Health Science Building, Room I-132
Title: Improving Design and Usability of Interactive Vulnerability Mapping for Global Health Preparedness
Abstract: Global health preparedness –the ability of organizations and governments to anticipate and respond to health events and emergencies– presents an imperative, yet challenging, opportunity for public health informatics interventions. Several, disparate factors and data sources influence the risk of a pandemic; presentation and understanding of that risk requires usable tools and technology. Spatial Systems for Decision Support (SSDS) are a subset of data visualizations that allow decision makers to complete spatially related tasks more efficiently and effectively. In my dissertation research, I will be introducing a new type of SSDS, interactive vulnerability mapping tools, which can help decision makers in global health preparedness identify spatial areas that are at risk for disease outbreak. Decision makers include epidemiologist, public health planners, vector control specialists, and directors, who might use this information to allocate resources or plan outreach activities to high risk regions. Further, sociotechnical considerations are not often taken into account in global health informatics, which is problematic as cultural and organizational factors could influence design, usability and acceptance. Given gaps in prior research on data visualization and usability in global health informatics, the objective of this dissertation project is to develop visualization tools that are evaluated for usability, propose design standards for data visualizations in global health preparedness, and contribute visualization principles that can enhance interactive vulnerability mapping tools. I will design, build, and evaluate the usability of interactive mapping tools for dengue vulnerability in Peru (Aim 1) and Rift Valley fever vulnerability in Kenya (Aim 2). I will compare design and usability findings from these two use cases through a sociotechnical lens to investigate transferability and flexibility (Aim 3). This work will contribute: 1) usable SDSS tools designed for public health decision makers in Peru and Kenya settings, 2) empirical data on the design, data visualization preferences, usability and acceptance of SSDS for disease vulnerability in global health settings, 3) demonstration of methodological approach for group usability in global public health settings, and 4) theoretical insights into the fit and translation of sociotechnical systems factors for global health informatics tools.
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Taketo Watase, Karl Jablonowski, Amber Sabbatini, Prospective Analysis of Alternative Services and Cost Savings of Avoidable Admissions from the Emergency Department, The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 2019, , ISSN 0735-6757, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2019.11.001.
Patrick J. Maher, Karl D. Jablonowski, Lynne D. Richardson, Squamous Epithelial Cell Presence Reduces Accuracy of Urinalysis for Prediction of Positive Urine Cultures, The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 2019,ISSN 0735-6757, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2019.11.024
Luo, S. He, B.L. Stone, F.L. Nkoy, and M.D. Johnson. Developing a Model to Predict Hospital Encounters for Asthma in Asthma Patients: Secondary Analysis. JMIR Medical Informatics.
Carolyn Petersen, Robin R Austin, Uba Backonja, Hugo Campos, Arlene E Chung, Eric B Hekler, Pei-Yun S Hsueh, Katherine K Kim, Anthony Pho, Liz Salmi, Anthony Solomonides, Rupa S Valdez. Citizen science to further precision medicine: from vision to implementation. JAMIA Open. It is available for free at: https://academic.oup.com/jamiaopen/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jamiaopen/ooz060/5651081
Alisha Brown, MD, Joshua Jauregui, MD, Jonathan S. Ilgen, MD, MCR, Jeffrey Riddell, MD, Douglas Schaad, PhD, Jared Strote, MD, MS, Jamie Shandro, MD, MPH, Does the Medium Matter? Evaluating the Depth of Reflective Writing by Medical Students on Social Media Compared to the Traditional Private Essay Using the REFLECT Rubric, Western Journal of Emergency Medicine, http://escholarship.org/uc/uciem_westjem DOI: 10.5811/westjem.2019.11.44263
Pozdeyev N, Arpit Patel A, Pottinger PS, Leu M, and Payne TH, Adherence to recommended post-splenectomy immunizations to reduce the risk of sepsis – the University of Washington experience. American Journal of Medical Quality. Accepted for publication.
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Bio-Informatics Postdoc Position
Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) – CDC funded at Wa DOH
Post doc in genome-based foodborne pathogen surveillance: qualified candidate should have received a master’s or doctoral degree in one of the relevant fields. Degree must have been received within five years of the appointment start date.
November 25-November 27, 2019
UPCOMING FINAL EXAM
Jim Phuong
Tuesday, December 3 at 1:00 pm; Health Sciences Building, BB1602
Title: Enhancing Secondary-use of Electronic Health Records for Geospatial-temporal Population Health Research
Abstract: For almost three decades, the United States Department of Human and Health Services, Center for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization have recognized the role of social and environmental determinants of health in understanding the health of populations. Community and population health is a function of each individual’s health and wellness, determined in large by socioeconomic status, environmental factors, and access to healthcare services. In disastrous times, spatiotemporally-relevant information escalate in importance as health systems strive to address emergent concerns, pre-existing needs, population migration, while experiencing disruption in available resources and infrastructure. With their adoption by hospitals and health systems, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain a richness and diversity of information about patients that could inform where and how to prepare for population-scale patient needs in future disaster scenarios; however, the ability to apply spatiotemporal reasoning with EHRs have remained an underrepresented capacity. Informatics innovations would need to account for the operational, technical, and ethical constraints felt by those who study the health of populations. In this dissertation, I focus on three areas for building capacities to use of geospatial-temporal information to address population health needs. The aims are to: 1) assess information needs and priority use-cases for population health research in hydrologic disaster preparedness, 2) design spatiotemporal use-case workflows to survey trends and anomalies for regional areas using gridded hydrometeorological data products, a surrogate for structured multivariate datasets, and 3) develop an approach for spatiotemporal inferential statistics of EHR patient diagnosis information. This work incorporates flexible design and secondary-use of data for population health research and geographic inferences in preparation for future disasters.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C123 A/B
December 5: Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad and Dr. Carly Eckert M.D., M.P.H.
Title: Explainable AI in Healthcare: Prospects and Limitations
Abstract: As AI and machine learning are being increasingly integrated into healthcare, challenges regarding creating responsible AI systems that are interpretable, fair, transparent, unbiased, robust and reliable are coming under increasing scrutiny. In this talk I will focus on one important aspect of such systems – Explainability, explore what constitutes explainable AI in healthcare and what are the nuances, challenges, and requirements for the design of explainable AI in healthcare. Drawing on insights from the academia and experience from industry the talk will delve into why is explainability in healthcare different from other domains and how deployed systems may have counterintuitive implications e.g., explainability leading to distrust, explainable systems leading to more opaque models etc. The talk will focus on the application of explainability techniques and the practical challenges in creating effective explainable AI models in healthcare. Finally, the talk will describe open problems and research directions for the AI in healthcare community.
Speaker Bios:
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is the Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Washington Tacoma and the Principal Research Data Scientist at KenSci, an Artificial Intelligence in healthcare focused company in Seattle. He has had academic appointments at University of Washington, Center for Cognitive Science at University of Minnesota, Minnesota Population Center and the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur. Muhammad Aurangzeb has published over 50 research papers in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. His work on personality emulation has been widely covered in the media. His current research is focused on Responsible of AI in healthcare via explainable, fair, unbiased, ethical and robust systems.
Carly Eckert, M.D., M.P.H. is the Medical Director of Clinical Informatics at KenSci. In this role, Dr. Eckert leads and works with doctors, data scientists, and developers to identify patterns in patient data to predict risk that can cost-effectively improve care outcomes. Prior to her role at KenSci, Dr. Eckert was the Associate Medical Director for Catastrophic Care at the Department of Labor & Industries for the state of Washington. She trained in General Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and in Occupational & Environmental Medicine and Preventive Medicine at the University of Washington (UW). Dr. Eckert received her Masters of Public Health (M.P.H.) in Epidemiology from the University of Washington School of Public Health where she continues her studies as a doctoral student in the Epidemiology department. She received her Doctor of Medicine (M.D.) from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
BIME 591A-Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science
Mondays, 2:30 pm-3:20 pm; Heath Sciences Building, Room T 478
Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield (Postdoctoral Fellow)
BIME 591B-Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare
Tuesdays, 11:30 am-12:20 pm; Health Sciences Building, Room T478
Facilitators: Will Kearns, Aakash Sur (BHI Graduate Students), Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Andrea Hartzler will be giving a talk in the iSchool Research Symposium on Dec 2nd:
UNBIASED: UNDERSTANDING PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION AND SUPPORTING ENHANCED DISCOURSE
Health-care bias — based on patients’ race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and other factors — leads to health disparities, such as lack of appropriate treatment and inadequate pain support. Although such biases are often unintentional and hidden in patient-provider interactions, they undermine trust, rapport, and health outcomes.
Dr. Hartzler will discuss a new project funded by NIH, in which researchers combine social signal processing — a computational approach that detects subtle forms of bias in nonverbal communication — with reflective feedback designed in collaboration with patients and providers. By investigating this technology, they hope to raise providers’ awareness of implicit bias and lay the foundation for training resources that will ultimately address health-care disparities.
iSCHOOL RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 12:30 P.M., BLOEDEL 070
Michelle Stoffel, BHI CI Fellow, A Taxonomic Index for Retrieval of Digitized Whole Slide Images from an Electronic Database for Medical School and Pathology Residency Education; Agnes G. Loeffler1, Mark Smith2, Elizabeth Way2, Michelle Stoffel2, Daniel F. I. Kurtycz3, Journal of Cytology, Volume 36, Issue 3, www.jcytol.org
1Department of Pathology, Metrohealth Medical Center, Cleveland, OH, USA, 2School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA, 3Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene, Madison, WI, USA
November 18-November 22, 2019
NEWS
Starting in January, Anne M. Turner will join the AMIA Board of Directors (2-year term) as Chair of the AMIA Academic Forum.
UPCOMING FINAL EXAM
Abhishek Pratap
Wednesday, November 27 at 10:15 am; Health Sciences Building, Room E216
Title: Assessing the utility of digital health technology to improve our capacity to assess and intervene in depression
Abstract: When it comes to mental health, no country is considered developed. In the last decade, the burden of mental health disorders(MHD) has risen in all countries due to disparities in timely diagnosis and access to evidence-based treatments. Additionally, scientists, are still conducting research to understand the underlying mechanisms behind MHD. Part of the problem is that measures of symptom severity are all based on self-reports by patients and clinician observation often resulting in an imprecise measurement of MHD. Those that are more objective(e.g: MRI) are costly and not widely available, nor are they ecologically valid measures of behavior. Additionally, in-clinic assessments tend to be episodic and often miss capturing the lived experience of disease over time including the potential impact of social and environmental factors that are suspected to be linked to neurodevelopmental and psychological processes. To improve long term outcomes in MHD, there is a critical need to develop new ways to objectively assess specific underlying constructs of behavior patterns linked with neuropsychiatric conditions. The pervasive network of smartphones offers researchers a unique opportunity to study MH at a population scale and at a fraction of the cost of traditional clinical research. The high-frequency daily usage of smartphones also provides new ways to capture the individualized momentary experience of living with mental health issues based on “real-world data”(RWD) in an objective, momentary and nonreactive way.
The principal findings of this dissertation research show the feasibility of utilizing smartphones to reach, enroll and engage a diverse and nationally representative population as well as the potential of using RWD in predicting mental health outcomes. The RWD collected from more than 2000 participants showed notable inter-/intra-person heterogeneity highlighting the challenges of developing a robust cohort level machine learning model to predict depression. However, personalized N-of-1 models show the promise of “precision digital psychiatry” by assessing an individual’s drifts from their own average “digital behavior” as a more reliable predictor of a person’s daily mood. Of note, participant enrollment and retention in large-scale digital health research studies remains a significant challenge. Cross study analysis using data from >100,000 participants showed significant underlying biases in technology access and utilization based on participants’ demographics that could impact the generalizability of the statistical inference drawn. In addition, the results from a survey-based study on a large and diverse sample show growing concerns among the general public about the security and privacy of their digital data which if left unaddressed can negatively influence people’s decision to participate and share data in digital health research.
These findings are contemporary and extend the on-going efforts to objectively evaluate the potential fit of technology in psychiatry in engaging the general population to monitor their mental health in the real world outside the clinic. However, while the technology shows the promise to move the psychiatric research from subjective to objective measures, episodic to continuous monitoring, provider-based to ubiquitous and reactive to proactive care; accomplishing these goals does come with measurable challenges. Further research is needed to develop robust and validated digital biomarkers of behavioral health. This includes large scale behavioral phenotyping studies (N > 100,000) that are powered to detect the association between RWD and behavioral anomalies, the ability to integrate RWD across similar studies, improve equitable utilization of technology across a diverse and representative population and address people’s concerns about data security and privacy.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C123 A/B
November 28: Thanksgiving
BIME 591A-Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science
Mondays, 2:30 pm-3:20 pm; Heath Sciences Building, Room T 478
Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield (Postdoctoral Fellow)
BIME 591B-Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare
Tuesdays, 11:30 am-12:20 pm; Health Sciences Building, Room T478
Facilitators: Will Kearns, Aakash Sur (BHI Graduate Students), Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Taylor, J.O., Turner, A.M., Hartzler, A.L., Osterhage, K.P., Demiris, G. Monitoring for change: the roles of friends and family in helping older adults manage personal health information. JAMIA. 2018 Aug 1; 25(8):989-999. Doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocy037
Bekemeier, B, Park, S, Backonja, U, Ornelas, I, Turner, AM. Data, capacity building and training needs to address rural health disparities in the Northwest United States: A qualitative study. JAMIA Special Issue Health Equity, Aug 1;26(8-9):825-834. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocz037.
Motzkus, C., Racquel J Wells, R.J., Wang, X., Chimienti, S., Plummer, D, Sabin, J., JAllison, J., Cashman, S. (2019), Pre-clinical medical student reflections on implicit bias: Implications for learning and teaching, PLoS One, Published: November 15, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225058
Andrea Hartzler will be giving a talk in the iSchool Research Symposium on Dec 2nd:
UNBIASED: UNDERSTANDING PATIENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION AND SUPPORTING ENHANCED DISCOURSE
Health-care bias — based on patients’ race, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, and other factors — leads to health disparities, such as lack of appropriate treatment and inadequate pain support. Although such biases are often unintentional and hidden in patient-provider interactions, they undermine trust, rapport, and health outcomes.
Dr. Hartzler will discuss a new project funded by NIH, in which researchers combine social signal processing — a computational approach that detects subtle forms of bias in nonverbal communication — with reflective feedback designed in collaboration with patients and providers. By investigating this technology, they hope to raise providers’ awareness of implicit bias and lay the foundation for training resources that will ultimately address health-care disparities.
iSCHOOL RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 2, 12:30 P.M., BLOEDEL 070
November 11-November 15, 2019
NEWS
New data science specialization approved:
The UW Graduate School has recently approved new data science specializations for our MS and PhD students. Following the framework provided by the eSciences Institute, we now offer both Advanced and Regular data science specializations for both our MS and our PhD students. Many of the courses that make up these specializations have already been popular among our graduate students, and by formalizing this set of courses as a specialization, we provide recognition of these data science skills on our students’ diplomas.
Please direct any questions to Jill Fulmore and John Gennari
Eric Tham MD, Adjunct BIME faculty, was elected a Fellow of AMIA which “signals to patients, employers, and colleagues that you are an expert in evidence-based informatics practice and engaged with a community of life-long learners who apply the latest advances in informatics to improve health and health care”.
Tania Bardyn, Affiliated Faculty in BIME and Associate Dean and Director Health Sciences Library and Director, National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region was elected as Secretary/Treasurer of the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL). AAHSL is comprises of over 160+ libraries serving the accredited U.S. and Canadian medical schools belonging to or affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). It includes other related libraries and organizations that lead in resolving information and knowledge management problems in the health care environment. The organization was founded in 1977. AAHSL is a member of the Council of Faculty and Academic Societies (CFAS) of the AAMC.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C123 A/B
November 21: Sean Mooney, PhD
Title: Predictive analytics and machine learning in healthcare and the UW: Vision, anecdotes and comments on readiness
Abstract: It is an opportune time to be engaged in the research and application of informatics in biomedicine. The increased use of electronic and personal health records and personal mobile devices is creating many opportunities at research academic medical centers. At the University of Washington, I believe we are laying the ground work to build the informatics and information technology infrastructure to support research on personalized approaches and the use of data science to enable them. We are beginning to see the early successes of these efforts and I will describe some of them. But there are many challenges, for example, we continue to generate massive amounts of data that is largely uncurated. This includes images, genomes and other -omics datasets, personal monitors, electronic health records, etc. In this presentation, I will discuss our support of data for research use within UW Medicine, our efforts to build new machine learning and data science approaches using clinical datasets, and our efforts to develop new machine learning methods. Further, we are leveraging the crowd by organizing and participating in community challenges (critical assessments) to build a better understanding of the types of approaches that perform well and in what context. I will describe our involvement in the Institute of Translational Health Sciences, UW Medicine Information Technology Services, the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education and the National Center for Data To Health and how this collaboration is building upon a vision to enable research translation to clinical care with a particular emphasis on data science methodology.
Speaker Bio: Prof. Sean Mooney has spent his career as a researcher and group leader in biomedical informatics. He now leads Research IT strategy for UW Medicine and is leading efforts to support and build clinical research informatic platforms as its first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) and as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington. He also leads biomedical informatics for the Institute of Translational Health Sciences at the University of Washington. He is involved in a number of other NIH programs including the NIDDK Kidney Precision Medicine Project. Additionally, he has a strong interests in leveraging the community of scientists to collaboratively solve difficult problems in biomedical research through open challenges and has participated in several as an organizer, assessor, predictor and advisor. Throughout his career, he has been an author on more than 100 publications, given more than 120 invited seminars and helped write the proposals of well over $100 million in funding. He has won several awards and accolades for his work. While at UCSF, he won the annual Frank M. Goyan Award for research in physical chemistry. He was part of the team that won the $150k Grand Prize in the Garage.com PlanEDU Business Plan Competition in 2000 and his team was featured on CNN and in BusinessWeek. He is co-founder of communities, including BioE2E, a nonprofit organization which focused on enabling biomedical entrepreneurship. BioE2E events were hosted for many years and had an impact throughout silicon and biotech valley in the Bay Area. Previous to his CRIO role, he was an Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. As an Assistant Professor, he was appointed in Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine and was founder and director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core. In 1997, he received his B.S. with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Then receiving a Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of California in San Francisco, and then an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellowship at Stanford University.
BIME 591A-Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science
Mondays, 2:30 pm-3:20 pm; Heath Sciences Building, Room T 478
Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield (Postdoctoral Fellow)
BIME 591B-Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare
Tuesdays, 11:30 am-12:20 pm; Health Sciences Building, Room T478
Facilitators: Will Kearns, Aakash Sur (BHI Graduate Students), Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty
November 4-November 8, 2019
NEWS
Adjunct Professor, Beth Devine (PI), along with co-investigators Patrick Mathias and David Veenstra, have received a $300,000, 2-year R21 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to conduct a project titled, ““Customizing Value-based Methods to Prioritize Implementation of Pharmacogenomic Clinical Decision Support for Learning Health Systems”. The grant has been funded through AHRQ’s “Health Information Technology to Improve Healthcare Quality and Outcomes” initiative.
Although active PGx clinical decision support (PGx-CDS) alerts are proposed as one preferred method for returning PGx test result,; the value of providing PGx-CDS alerts has not been formally evaluated. We will create a framework (Aim 1) and publically available, web-based tool (Aim 2) to assist Learning Health Systems in investing in PGx-CDS alerts of greatest value to their specific population. Other significant contributors include David Crosslin, Brian Shirts, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, and Jared Erwin; Dan Malone (University of Utah) will be consulting. The web-based tools will be beta-tested by our partners at Columbia, Mayo, Northwestern, and Yale.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C259
November 14: No speaker this week
BIME 591A-Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science
Mondays, 2:30 pm-3:20 pm; Heath Sciences Building, Room T 478
Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield (Postdoctoral Fellow)
BIME 591B-Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare
Tuesdays, 11:30 am-12:20 pm; Health Sciences Building, Room T478
Facilitators: Will Kearns, Aakash Sur (BHI Graduate Students), Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Payne TH, Lovis C, Gutteridge C, Pagliari C, Natarajan S, Yong C, Zhou L-P. Status of Health Information Exchange: A Comparison of Six Countries. J Glob Health. 2019 Dec;9(2):0204279. doi: 10.7189/jogh.09.020427. PMID: 31673351
Mower J, Cohen T, Subramanian D. Complementing Observational Signals with Literature-Derived Distributed Representations for Post-Marketing Drug Surveillance. Drug Safety. 2019 Oct 23. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40264-019-00872-9