News and Events | Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

Chair’s Message

pth-use-this-one We are moving toward our vision with a number of activities. We completed the Clinical Informatics Fellowship match and filled our two open positions with two excellent candidates who started July 2018. We completed the interview process for our research focused MS and research focused PhD programs, and have a new cohort who will start in Fall 2018. Applications are open for our applied on-line MS in Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies. We are beginning a new overall strategic planning process for all of our Departmental activities in conjunction with preparing for our every 10 year academic program review. We are still actively recruiting new faculty as part of our strategic plan to expand our core faculty by 50%, with 3-4 positions remaining to be filled over the next two years (see link).

Cordially,

Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, MD
Chair and Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education

Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter

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

October 28-November 1, 2019

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 7: Speaker: Laura Dwyer-Lindgren

Title: Local Burden of Disease: Mapping local trends in HIV prevalence, incidence, and mortality

Abstract: Despite improvements over the last decade, HIV remains a major cause of death and ill health throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, and there is an increasing demand for subnational, locally-relevant data on the HIV epidemic to more effectively target interventions and monitor progress. This talk will discuss methods and results from ongoing research as part of the Local Burden of Disease project aimed at mapping trends in HIV prevalence, incidence, and mortality at a local level.

Speaker Bio: Laura Dwyer-Lindgren is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on small area estimation and geostatistical modeling methods, spatial patterns of health outcomes, and geographic health disparities.

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

Janice Sabin, PhD, MSW, BIME, lead a continuing education workshop for the Social Work Department, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, title: Implicit Bias in Healthcare: Striving for Equity, October 25, 2019, Memphis, TN.

The work of HEALTH-E research group (Drs. Hilaire Thompson and George Demiris) was featured in this week’s Primed Podcast on KUOW. The podcast also features former BHI PhD Student (now Post-doc at UC Davis) Yong Choi.

https://www.kuow.org/stories/primed-season-3-episode-2

OTHER

EHR DREAM Challenge is operating in partnership with UW and Sage Bionetworks, and supported through our joint CD2H funding.

October 21-October 25, 2019

NEWS

The National Library of Medicine announced $2.8 million to fund researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine to lead an effort to develop technology that alerts clinicians when their unconscious biases might be affecting how they interact with patients. The “UnBIASED” project is led by Andrea Hartzler, Associate Professor and co-director of the UW’s Clinical Informatics and Patient-Centered Technologies Program. Others on the team include Janice Sabin, an Associate Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the UW; Wanda Pratt, a Professor at the UW Information School and Nadir Weibel, an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego.

https://newsroom.uw.edu/postscript/can-tech-make-doctors-aware-their-unconscious-biases

George Demiris, Ph.D., BIME affiliate faculty and PIK University Professor, Department of Biobehavioral and Health sciences, School of Nursing, and Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine “for groundbreaking research that has advanced our understanding and application of health informatics to improve the health of vulnerable populations and influence health policy.” The NAM announcement for the newly elected members can be found at:

https://nam.edu/national-academy-of-medicine-elects-100-new-members/

UPCOMING FINAL EXAM

Dae Hyun Lee

Friday, November 1^st at 9:00am, South Lake Union, Building C, Room C123B

Title: Predictive Approaches for Acute Adverse Events in Electronic Health Records

Abstract: Medical errors have been cited as the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2013. Failure to rescue (FTR) is a subtype of medical errors and refers to the loss of an opportunity to save a patient’s life after the development of one or more preventable and treatable complications. Focusing on detecting early signs of deterioration may therefore provide opportunities to prevent and/or treat an illness in a timely manner, which may in turn reduce the number of FTR cases. When implementing a data-driven model to predict the risk of potential FTR onsets in a supervised setting, gold standard information for the target FTR onset is often not directly retrievable in electronic health records (EHR) so that it requires to manually annotate clinical observations with corresponding labels. This method acts as a bottleneck to scalability and the full utilization of the clinical observations available in EHRs for model training. In this dissertation, I propose a machine learning framework that can be used to derive a risk prediction model using proxy events of the disease of interest, the administration of relevant clinical interventions, as a noisy label via a distant supervision approach. Moreover, this study evaluated the effects of considering the temporal progression of FTR risk estimates calculated using myopic evidence. Lastly, a case study is presented to demonstrate that the proposed prediction models can be deployed to quantify the adverse effects of clinical interventions with regard to the target disease of interest. This dissertation demonstrates 1) the feasibility of using proxy events of the target disease as a label for supervised model training, 2) the performance improvement when temporal progression is considered in the risk prediction model design, and 3) the applicability of the proposed risk prediction model to quantify the adverse effects of clinical interventions regarding the target disease. Suggestions are also provided on how the proposed model could be further improved by integrating experts’ knowledge with the proposed framework.

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series

Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C259

October 31: Speaker: Andrew Simms, PhD

Title: RiskView, a Rules-based Clinical Decision Support Capability for DrChrono

Abstract: DrChrono is a small practice electronic medical record with a growing presence in both the primary care and urgent care markets. In contrast to many EMR vendors, DrChrono supports and encourages the development of 3rd party applications. DrChrono is written entirely in Python/Django, with a simple information model and a rich integration API. Leveraging the integration features of DrChrono and an open source production rule package called Experta, Saperi systems was able to quickly build a proof-of-concept web application called RiskView for evaluating an urgent care patient’s risk of Kawasaki disease. The application consumes webhook events from the DrChrono EMR, gathers information from data in the DrChrono record, and asserts facts into a knowledge base. A reasoning engine then evaluates these facts against a set of rules, deriving new facts until all rules are satisfied. The design allows a clean separation between clinical logic and EMR specific features and can easily be extended to more complex use cases.

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

Annie Chen, PhD, gave a talk on October 21 entitled, “Online Communities as Vehicles to Share Health Information and Support — Challenges and Critical Questions”, as part of the University of British Columbia iSchool Colloquium Series.

Misbah Keen, MD, MBI, MPH, Danielle Bienz, M.Ed., Toby Keys, MA, MPH, Douglas Schaad, PhD, David Evans, MD: “The WRITE Stuff: A Rural Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship Addresses Workforce Needs”. Journal of Regional Medical Campuses

Hannah Burkhardt, BHI PhD student, had her paper entitled “Predicting Adverse Drug-Drug Interactions with Neural Embedding of Semantic Predications” chosen for the KDDM Student Innovation Award. She will present her work during the AMIA Annual Symposium.

Houda Benlhabib, BHI Postdoctoral Fellow, has been selected to present her abstract, “The Use of Machine Learning for Modeling a Clinical Decision Support for Predicting Postpartum Depression”, at the Rocky 2019 Conference this December in Colorado.

Shefali Haldar, Sonali R. Mishra, Ari H Pollack, Wanda Pratt. “Informatics Opportunities to Involve Patients in Hospital Safety: A Conceptual Model”. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA 2019). https://academic.oup.com/jamia/advancearticle/doi/10.1093/jamia/ocz167/5580382

YiFan Wu, BHI PhD student, and her group was selected as one of the three finalists for the AMIA 2019 Student Design Challenge (https://www.amia.org/amia2019/student-design-challenge).

Shefali Haldar, blog post: https://medium.com/@shaldar/how-to-stop-feeling-vulnerable-in-the-hospital-777f1f13a4b7

OTHER

Shawn Banta, Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program Administrator, received a certificate acknowledging 20 years of continuous service at University of Washington. She joined UW in October of 1999 as a Secretary Senior in the Department of Radiology. She subsequently worked in Patient Care Services Administration at UWMC, and Regional Affairs and Graduate Medical Education in the UW Medicine Dean’s office, before joining BIME in September of 2014.

UW ranked most innovative public universities by Reuters

The University of Washington is listed at No. 5 on the Reuters Top 100: The World’s Most Innovative Universities, released Wednesday. For the third consecutive year, the UW leads the list among public institutions.

UW is No. 10 on global ranking; No. 2 among US public institutions

The University of Washington maintained its No. 10 spot on the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities rankings, released this week. The UW is ranked No. 2 among U.S. public institutions.

“It’s an honor for the University of Washington to once more be recognized for the strength of our research and scholarship. This ranking is a testament to both our outstanding faculty across many disciplines and to the opportunities for research and discovery that bring our talented students here,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce said.

October 14-October 18, 2019

NEWS

Uba Backonja, BIME Adjunct Assistant Professor, has accepted an invitation to be on the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Editorial Board for 2020-2022.

The University of Washington Health Sciences Library is pleased to present the traveling exhibit, Opening Doors: Contemporary African American Academic Surgeons from October 14th through November 23rd, 2019. The exhibition celebrates pioneering African-American academic surgeons and their medical and educational contributions to the field of medicine. The trailblazing surgeons highlighted in this exhibition paved the way for the future medical practitioners an opened doors to improved health care for the African American community. It is free and open to the public during regular library hours. This exhibit was developed and produced by the National Library of Medicine and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Brotman Auditorium
October 24: Speaker: Peter Small

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

Akhavan, A. R., N. Johnson, B. Friedman, K. Jablonowski, J. Hall, M. K. Hall, and D. J. Henning. “355 Assessing the Prognostic Value of Lactate Levels in the Presence of Ethanol Among Emergency Department Patients.” Annals of Emergency Medicine 74, no. 4 (2019): S139-S140.

Haldar S, Mishra SR, Pollack AH, Pratt W. Informatics opportunities to involve patients in hospital safety: a conceptual model. JAMIA 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz167.

October 7-October 11, 2019

NEWS

Please give Trevor Cohen your congrats for his election to ACMI. This is quite the honor. As per ACMI web site ACMI members are: “Individuals that have demonstrated major contributions in biomedical and health informatics, have achieved national recognition in the field, and are committed to advancing the charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes of ACMI are eligible for membership as a fellow. Each year, new fellows are elected by the voting members of ACMI. Fellows are elected for life and upon election are named Fellows of ACMI and may use the designation “FACMI”. https://www.amia.org/acmi-fellowship

Dear Colleagues,

The University of Washington School of Medicine is excited to be the host school for the annual Western Group on Educational Affairs (WGEA) meeting March 28-31, 2020—and to sponsor the meeting’s return to a much loved site—Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California! A reminder that abstracts are due by 11:59 p.m., Thursday, October 31.

Asilomar has everything—gorgeous ocean-side setting, historic buildings (designed by the famous architect Julia Morgan) and a relaxed setting conducive to collaboration and networking! In keeping with the location, the meetings theme is: Common Ground: Attune, Affirm, Advance

Take a look at the video that demonstrates why Asilomar is one of the best conference sites anywhere:

We urge you to submit your abstracts for the meeting by the October 31 at 11:59 p.m. deadline and to plan to attend the meeting. Please distribute this information along with the “save the date” to your colleagues and urge them to attend!

Let us know if we can answer any questions. We will send out the dress code closer to the event, but here’s a hint – no suits, ties or heels!
To keep up with conference updates, check out www.wgea2020.com

Lynne Robins, PhD
Chair, Planning Committee
lynner@uw.edu

Joshua Jauregui, MD
Co-Chair, Planning Committee
joshjuar@uw.edu

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C123A/B
October 17: Speaker: Mustafa Sir, Research Scientist, Amazon.com, Inc.

Title: Data-Driven Patient Access Management

Abstract: Patient-provider mismatch, late cancelations, frequent rescheduling, and no-shows result in long delays in getting specialty care appointments, higher costs, and more importantly, poor health outcomes. We propose an intelligent patient access management system that uses existing clinical and transactional data to ensure that the right patient sees the right provider at the right time. To that end, we developed a software platform referred to as Priority-Driven Patient Access Tool (PDPAT). PDPAT allows clinical departments to define their patient prioritization schema based on medical indication and other patient characteristics and makes various appointment itinerary suggestions to appointment coordinators for optimal scheduling. PDPAT dynamically reserves capacity for high-priority patients while delaying lower-priority patient through so-called scheduling time windows. The time window for each priority group are optimized based on 1) patient mix targets set by the practice and 2) empirically estimated patient willingness-to-wait (WtW) behavior. A pilot study at a surgical division resulted in reduced access time and increased throughput, due to better coordination of clinic and surgical calendars.

Speaker Bio: Mustafa Y. Sir, Ph.D., is Senior Research Scientist at Amazon.com Inc. Previously, he was a faculty member in the Department of Health Sciences Research at Mayo Clinic and co-led a research program in Information & Decision Engineering at the Mayo Clinic Kern Center for the Science of Health Care Delivery. He graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) from the University of Michigan in 2007 with a focus on Operations Research. He also holds Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Engineering (M.S.E.) degrees in IOE and an M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering-Systems, all from the University of Michigan. Through the combination of operations research, machine learning, and informatics, Dr. Sir’s research aims at eliminating waste, improving the safety of patients and providers, and aiding physicians to optimize an individual patient’s treatment plan. For instance, he has developed a novel data-driven patient access management framework, which uses clinical notes and other patient characteristics to determine a patient’s priority and historical appointment data to determine a patient’s willingness-to-wait behavior regarding scheduled appointments. His work on multidisciplinary Emergency Department staffing optimization has been selected as a finalist for the 2016 Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. Using dynamic & stochastic programming and control theory, he developed adaptive treatment planning strategies for radiation therapy, considering the positional uncertainties caused by daily patient setup procedures and internal organ motion. He is a co-investigator on the AHRQ-funded Improving Diagnosis in Emergency and Acute care – Learning Laboratory (IDEA-LL), a novel program for diagnostic safety surveillance and intervention using actionable, patient-centered data obtained from both frontlines of care and electronic health records (EHRs) as input to a diagnostic error risk prediction tool.

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)

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

Mohan S, Venkatakrishnan A, Hartzler AL. Designing an AI Health Coach and Studying its Utility in Promoting Regular Aerobic Exercise. Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), in press.

Freedman, S., & Hammarlund, N. (2019). Electronic medical records and medical procedure choice: Evidence from cesarean sections. Health Economics, 28(10), 1179–1193.

Dobbins NJ, Spital CH, Black RA, Morrison JM, de Veer B, Zampino E, Harrington RD, Britt BD, Stephens KA, Wilcox AB, Tarczy-Hornoch P, Mooney SD. Leaf: an open-source, model-agnostic, data-driven web application for cohort discovery and translational biomedical research. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ocz165.

OTHER

BIME Happy Hour
Thursday, October 17, 5:00 p.m., South Lake Union, Reception Lounge
Please join us for our monthly departmental BYOB Happy Hour. As always, please bring your own beverage; snacks will be provided!

September 30-October 4, 2019

NEWS

Andrea Hartzler was selected for the first cohort of women leaders in the inaugural “Women in AMIA (WIA) Leadership Program” https://sites.google.com/view/amiawomen/home?authuser=0

Ross Lordon, Recent BHI PhD Graduate, has accepted a position as a Design Researcher with Microsoft.

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series

Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, C123B

October 10: Speaker: Bryant Karras, M.D. Chief Informatics Officer, Office of the State Health Officer/Chief Science Officer, Washington State Department of Health

Title: Data@Health: Washington State DOH’s 21st Century Informatics Transformation

Abstract: Data@Health is an initiative to make Washington’s health data more timely, responsive to user’s needs, and informative for decision making. It will help us improve our public health services by providing state, local and tribal partners more robust and integrated information using shared tools and environments. This presentation will share the planning for the Data@Health initiative and linkages with similar work being done across state agencies. We will also discuss how to become involved with this work as it moves forward.

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

Austin E, LeRouge C, Hartzler AL, Heim J, Segal C, Lavallee DC. Capturing the patient voice: implementing patient-reported outcomes across the health system. Quality of Life Research (In Press).

HCDE pre-doctoral student, Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang, has been selected as one of the eight student paper finalists in the AMIA 2019 Annual Symposium for her paper entitled Connected Personas: Translating the Complexity of Older Adult Personal Health Information Management for Designers of Health Information Technologies. Co-authors included Julien Kientz, Jean Taylor and Anne Turner. She will present the paper findings at the AMIA Annual Symposium in November.

September 23-27, 2019

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series

Thursdays, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C

October 3: Speaker: TBD

BIME 590A-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 590B-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

Austin E, LeRouge C, Hartzler AL, Chung A, Segal C, Lavallee DC. Opportunities and challenges to advance the use of electronic patient-reported outcomes in clinical care: A report from AMIA workshop proceedings. JAMIA Open (In Press).

A recent publication by BIME faculty is a finalist for the 2019 Diana Forsythe Award:

Taylor JO, Hartzler AL, Osterhage KP, Demiris G, Turner AM. Monitoring for change: the role of family and friends in helping older adults manage personal health information. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2018;25(8):989-999.

Eschler J, Menking A, Fox S, Backonja U. Defining Menstrual Literacy With the Aim of Evaluating Mobile Menstrual Tracking Applications. Comput Inform Nurs. 2019 Sep 12. doi: 10.1097/CIN.0000000000000559. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31524688

Independent and Interwoven: A Qualitative Exploration of Residents’ Experiences with Educational PodcastsEducational podcasts are an increasingly popular platform for teaching and learning in health professions education. Residents described podcasts as an accessible and engaging learning platform that offered them broad exposure to core content and personalized learning. Jeffrey Riddell, MD, Lynne Robins, PhD, Alisha Brown, MD, Jonathan Sherbino, MD, MEd, Michelle Lin, MD, and Jonathan S. Ilgen, MD, MCR

Lynne Robins, PhD, Faculty Perceptions of Formative Feedback from Medical Students Article, Sep 2019, Teaching and Learning in Medicine

OTHER

Andrea Hartzler, Janice Sabin, and Wanda Pratt were awarded an R01 from NLM:

UnBIASED: Understanding Biased patient-provider Interaction And Supporting Enhanced Discourse (Hartzler, PI)

The goal of this project is to investigate a novel social signal processing approach to help reduce health disparities by improving patient-clinician communication and reducing implicit bias in care for low income, racially diverse primary care patients.

https://ischool.uw.edu/news/2019/09/researchers-win-funding-study-bias-patient-doctor-communication?fbclid=IwAR0Xab9UbBSap7d8j4Etvioh-9sGMVfr5Dq7t-xJp1P2gshUvCwBYUdL6_g

Thomas Payne, MD, was appointed as Member, Healthcare Research Training (HCRT) Study Section, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Four year term, October 1, 2019-September 30, 2023.

INVITATION–CALL FOR PAPERS for the SPECIAL ISSUE: Learning Health Systems Journal:

Special Issue: Computational Phenotyping

Guest Editor: Dr. Vasa Curcin, King’s College London, UK vasa.curcin@kcl@ac.uk

Editor in Chief: Dr. Charles Friedman cpfried@umich.edu

Submit Paper: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/lhsjournal

Background

Learning Health Systems require high-quality routinely collected Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to serve as input to novel machine learning and AI techniques and translate the outputs of these technologies into patient care and service improvement. To achieve this, the data in research databases need not only be of high-quality, but methods associated with its use need to be transparent and reproducible to ensure that any findings can be validated by the research community and generalised to the target population. At the core of this challenge is the ability to reliably identify clinically equivalent research-grade patient phenotypes capturing a particular disease variety, sets of comorbidities, medical histories, demographic profile or any other relevant patient-specific information – a process known as computational phenotyping.

The popularity of EHR data for research created an increased drive to document and share clinical phenotypes derived from research datasets in order to stimulate reuse, reduce variation in phenotype definitions across data sources and ultimately simplify and support the identification of clinically equivalent populations for research and healthcare applications. Reuse of existing phenotype definitions requires access to large sets of validated phenotypes, together with metadata needed to efficiently evaluate and implement them in a new research use case. Such phenotype collections have been used to identify traits and diseases for biomedical research and clinical care, recruitment for clinical trials, quality improvement studies, population-based health outcomes research, disease or drug safety surveillance, and genetic research.

Scope, Description, and More Information

This Special Issue of the Learning Health Systems journal invites submissions that feature original research on methods for developing reusable phenotype definitions, including computable representations, supervised and non-supervised algorithms, high-throughput phenotyping techniques, techniques for phenotype validation, and examples of successful phenotype repositories. A suitable submission must exhibit or discuss how the resulting approaches, techniques, or systems advance the concept of a Learning Health System. Interdisciplinary and applied research is especially encouraged.

Specific areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Use of natural language processing for translating human-readable phenotype definitions (from patient notes or scientific papers) into machine-readable formats for high-throughput phenotyping
High-throughput phenotyping techniques for generating thousands of phenotypes with minimal human supervision
Workflow models for formalising phenotyping algorithm representation
Publishing phenotypes in a reusable form, including metadata, execution environments, software packages
Deep learning for feature selection in phenotype definitions
Addressing overfitting and local bias in supervised learning techniques
Integrating genomic and phenomic data in research studies
Models for representing longitudinal phenotypes with complex data relationships
Heterogeneous phenotyping including sensor, IoT and social network data
Statistical measures of confidence in the assignment of a computable phenotype to a person, e.g. calculations of a fit to an individual compared to the determinants of a computable phenotype.

Schedule

Full paper submission deadline: January 15, 2019
Final author notification: Summer 2020
Expected publication: Autumn 2020 (see below)

The LHS Journal offers Early View wherein finished articles are made available before their actual inclusion in the issue. In Early View, articles are published online (including all figures and tables) and are fully citable and freely downloadable.

NB: In addition to the standard research paper format, authors are also encouraged to consider submitting Computable Knowledge papers which focus on a model, algorithm or another form of digital knowledge object. The LHS Journal welcomes two types of Computable Knowledge publications: CK-Enhanced and CK-Implementation, details of which can be found here: http://bit.ly/lhs-cbk

September 9-13, 2019

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series

Thursday, September 26, 11:00am-11:50am, UW Medicine South Lake Union, Building C, Room C123 A/B

(livestream at tcs.slu.washington.edu)

Speaker: Wanda Pratt, PhD

Title: Designing for Patient Power in Improving Healthcare

Abstract: Many problems plague healthcare today—from nearly 700 people in the U.S. dying each day from medical errors to over 45% of the population struggling with a chronic disease. Many valiant efforts, including technological advances, have kept these problems from becoming even worse, but I argue that patients remain an underutilized yet valuable resource to help address these problems. In this talk, I will describe a variety of projects where we have worked with patients and their caregivers to understand their needs and to design new technologies to provide more power to patients in safeguarding, managing, and improving their own health.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Wanda Pratt is a Professor in the Information School with an adjunct appointment in Biomedical & Health Informatics in the Medical School at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on understanding people’s health information needs and designing new technologies to address those needs. She has worked with hospitalized patients as well as people coping with a variety of chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. Dr. Pratt has received best paper awards from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and the Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology (JASIS&T). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Library of Medicine, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft. Dr. Pratt is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. In addition, she is on the Board of Directors for AMIA, and Chaired their 2016 Annual Symposium.

BIME 591A– Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science

Mondays, Autumn Quarter: 2:30pm-3:20pm, Health Sciences Building, T478

Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield, BHI Postdoctoral Fellow

This course will openly explore Biomedical Informatics Research methods, analysis, and applications to cutting-edge Craniofacial Care and Science. We will hear presentations regarding active research being conducted at Children’s Medical Center and Research Institute Seattle. We will review newly developed bioinformatic and computer science advancements as they are being applied to better understand normal and anomalous craniofacial growth, development, and how such knowledge evolves into improved data collection and analysis, diagnosis, and treatment. Lectures will be presented by guest speakers, course materials will include a syllabus, recommended reading, and exploratory hands-on projects (if desired).

BIME 591B- Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare

Tuesdays, Autumn Quarter: 11:30 am-12:20 pm, Health Sciences Building, T478

Facilitators: Aakash Sur, Will Kearns, BHI PhD Students and Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty

Through this course, students will be introduced to reinforcement learning methods and how to apply them to train health dialog systems to address specific problems in healthcare. We will cover a range of machine learning methods including tree search, tree pruning, Markov decision processes, and Q-learning. We will explore both classical methods and recent advances in the development of dialog system components including natural language understanding, dialog management, and natural language generation. The course structure will be a mixture of lectures and interactive coding sessions culminating in the deployment of a health dialog system.

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

*this paper has been selected as a finalist for the Diane Forsythe Award because of its important contribution to informatics and the social sciences. The winner will be announced at the closing ceremony at AMIA on November 20th.

OTHER

Blaine Reeder, PhD, BHI Alumnus 2010, started a new position at the University of Missouri as Associate Professor with Tenure with joint appointments at the Sinclair School of Nursing and the MU Informatics Institute.

September 2-September 6, 2019

UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS

BIME 591A– Informatics Contributions to Craniofacial Care and Science

Mondays, Autumn Quarter: 2:30pm-3:20pm, Health Sciences Building, T478

Facilitator: W. Mike Hairfield, BHI Postdoctoral Fellow

BIME 591B- Artificial Intelligence Methods for Conversational Agents in Healthcare

Tuesdays, Autumn Quarter: 11:30 am-12:20 pm, Health Sciences Building, T478

Facilitators: Aakash Sur, Will Kearns, BHI PhD Students and Trevor Cohen, BHI Faculty

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

Leu M, Akande T, Martin L, Pozdeyev N, Sadeghian R. Using Analytics to Prospectively Improve Quality of Clinical Decision Support. Lyon, France: 2019. MedInfo 2019.

Sutton PR and Payne TH. Interoperability of Electronic Health Information and Care of Dialysis Patients. Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Accepted for publication.

OTHER

The JAMIA special issue on health equity was released on August 18th.

It’s a double issue and all articles will be free for 30 days.

https://academic.oup.com/jamia/issue/26/8-9

Paul Crane, in the Dep’t of Medicine has received a two-year, $460K supplement entitled “ADNI Psychmetrics: Machine Learning to discern Natural History” for his existing R01 work in Alzheimer’s disease research. John Gennari is key personnel (co-investigator) for this supplement, and the work will support Harkirat Sohi’s dissertation research.

“This is an exciting opportunity to harness some of the Alzheimer’s-related funding that has been made available in recent years to enhance the workforce of Alzheimer’s researchers. This funding will enable specific applied focus on an Alzheimer’s related research program, which is a real win-win for the University and for my project. I’m very excited at this opportunity to partner with Dr. Gennari and Ms. Sohi for this project, and I look forward to learning at least as much as they do about ways to harness these technologies in this area.” Paul Crane

August 19-August 23, 2019

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

Molly C Reid, Kathryn Peebles, Sarah E Stansfield, Steven M Goodreau, Neil Abernethy, Geoffrey S Gottlieb, John E Mittler, Joshua T Herbeck. Models to predict the public health impact of vaccine resistance: A systematic review. Vaccine 2019

BIME Adjunct Assistant Prof. Uba Backonja served on the Guest Editorial Committee and the following special issue included this article by BIME authors: Data, capacity-building, and training needs to address rural health inequities in the Northwest United States: a qualitative study by Betty Bekemeier, Seungeun Park, Uba Backonja, India Ornelas, Anne M Turner.

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. Journal of Global Health. Accepted for publication.

OTHER

The JAMIA special issue on health equity was released on August 18th.

It’s a double issue and all articles will be free for 30 days.

https://academic.oup.com/jamia/issue/26/8-9

August 12-August 16, 2019

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

Roopsawang, I., Chen, A. T., & Zaslavsky, O. (accepted). Behavioral change features in mobile health interventions for older adults: A scoping review. Research in Gerontological Nursing.

Teng, A., Han, S., Lin S.-Y., Demiris, G., Zaslavsky, O., & Chen A. T. (accepted). Using an innovative discussion platform to give voice to aging-related experiences: A pilot study. Journal of Gerontological Nursing.

Chen, A. T., Chang, J. H., Hallinan, S., & Mohr, D. C. Mapping user trajectories: Using participant flows to examine behavior and outcomes in digital health intervention data. To be presented at the Visual Analytics in Healthcare Workshop, co-located with IEEE VIS 2019 (Oct. 20-25, 2019). Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Chen, A. T., Raza, M., Gazula, Y., Huang, D., Mendoza, J., & Andrews, W. (accepted). Grounding users in interpretive acts: Lessons learned in the iterative design of a digital collection. To be presented at the 4th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), co-located with IEEE VIS 2019 (Oct. 20-25, 2019). Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Jennifer A. Best, Sara Kim. The FIRST Curriculum: Cultivating Speaking Up Behaviors in the Clinical Learning Environment. The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing. 2019;50(8):355-361https://doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20190717-06

Estiri H, Stephens KA, Klann JG, Murphy SN. Exploring completeness in clinical data research networks with DQe-c. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2018 Jan 1;25(1):17-24

August 5-August 9, 2019

Reza Sadeghian, MD, MBA, MSc, FAAP: As a Co-Chair of division of digital health and innovation at Southern Medical Association, we strive to provide high quality podcasts on various medical topics and business side of medicine. Our latest five podcasts focused on lean and Toyota Production System with our guest Dr. Darren Migita from Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The link is as follow:

http://smahealthtech.libsyn.com/

Leaf Workshop: Tuesday, August 27 1-2:30 pm in the TRAIL Space

Folks must have AMC System access prior to the workshop. The ITHS Leaf website provides guidance on how to do so at https://www.iths.org/investigators/services/bmi/leaf/