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
January 18-22, 2021
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Drs. Jodell Linder and David Crosslin led the eMERGE III lessons learned marker paper that was accepted to HGG last month and just published online a couple days ago: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xhgg.2020.100018. It is also one of the three articles featured on the homepage: https://www.cell.com/hgg-advances/home. Drs. Andrea Hartzler (BIME faculty and alum), Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, BIME affiliate Dr. James Ralston, and BIME alum Dr. Casey Overby Taylor are also co-authors.
Alumna Dr. Shefali Haldar will present a webinar for the AMIA Consumer and Public Health Informatics Working Group. She will discuss the use and impact of an online community for hospital patients on Monday, January 25, 9-10am Pacific Time (12-1 pm EST) at https://t.co/7s0dSH7jkq The talk is based on our recently published JAMIA paper:
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, Volume 27, Issue 4, April 2020, Pages 549-557, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz212
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursdays, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
January 28, 2021: Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, Vice President and Chief Science Officer,
IBM Watson Health
Associate Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Title: TBD
BIME 591B
Facilitator: Sarah Stansfield
Tuesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Covid-19 Modeling
BIME 591C
Facilitators: Andrew Berry & Matthew Hong
Wednesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Participatory Design in the Age of Digital Health
UPCOMING FINAL EXAM
Tim Bergquist
Friday, February 12, 2021; 4:00 PM
Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/4818681328
Title: Ensuring Patient Privacy and Accuracy of Analytical Methods to Support Evidence-Based Healthcare
Abstract: Over the past two decades, healthcare providers substantially increased their use of electronic health record (EHR) systems. While the early roll outs of these systems have been fraught with complications and the quality of data from these systems is questionable at times, these EHR systems continue to improve. EHRs are primed to become the core of the data driven healthcare system, with the potential to serve as a platform for population health analytics and predictive model development. However, EHRs represent a high risk for exposing patient records and business practices to nefarious actors. Creating infrastructure to deliver predictive methods to clinical records while protecting patient privacy is key to building a reliable healthcare analytics platform. In this dissertation, I focus on three areas with four aims for building a safe and private data analytics platform on the electronic health record. The aims are to: (1) evaluate the University of Washington EHR as a generalizable public health repository, (2) Pilot a Model-to-Data framework as a method to deliver predictive analytic methods to clinical records (3) Scale the Model-to-Data pipeline to host a community challenge, delivering outside models to electronic health records and (4) Develop a patient portal to enable the return of clin
January 11-15, 2021
NEWS
Hilaire Thompson, PhD, ARNP, Adjunct Professor in BIME, has been appointed as an Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Personnel in the Office of Academic Personnel beginning January 16, 2021.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursdays, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
BIME 591B
Facilitator: Sarah Stansfield
Tuesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Covid-19 Modeling
BIME 591C
Facilitators: Andrew Berry & Matthew Hong
Wednesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Participatory Design in the Age of Digital Health
January 4-8, 2021
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Arseneau ME, Backonja U, Litchman ML, Karimanfard R, Sheng XM, Taylor-Swanson L. #Menopause on Instagram: A mixed methods study. Menopause. 2021 (ahead of print). doi: 10.1097/GME.0000000000001713
Jujjavarapu, C., Anandasakaran, J., Amendola, L.M. et al. ShareDNA: a smartphone app to facilitate family communication of genetic results. BMC Med Genomics 14, 10 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12920-020-00864-0
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursdays, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
BIME 591B
Facilitator: Sarah Stansfield
Tuesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Covid-19 Modeling
Course Description: This journal-club style seminar will discuss predictive and epidemic models of Covid-19. There has been an outpouring of modeling work published in journals and in archives predicting virus effects. We will go through many of these models and evaluate methods and assumptions to learn how to better critique models.
BIME 591C
Facilitators: Andrew Berry & Matthew Hong
Wednesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Participatory Design in the Age of Digital Health
Course Description: Designing effective patient-centered technologies requires all stakeholders (including patients, caregivers, clinicians and many relevant stakeholders) to participate in the creative design process, thus enabling the infusion of their values, skills and knowledge in the final designed outcomes. We call this Participatory Design (PD). While PD relies on a range of in-person research activities, the recent pandemic has disrupted the status quo, forcing researchers to adapt to new constraints that come with running PD activities (e.g., design workshops) entirely through online channels. This course invites students to learn about fundamental concepts in PD, how to apply them in various care settings as well as contribute new knowledge that can be used toward doing PD in the age of digital health.
December 28, 2020-January 1, 2021
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
K. Lybarger, M. Ostendorf, and M. Yetisgen, “Annotating social determinants of health using active learning, and characterizing determinants using neural event extraction,” Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 2020, doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2020.103631.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursdays, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
BIME 591B
Facilitator: Sarah Stansfield
Tuesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Covid-19 Modeling
Course Description: This journal-club style seminar will discuss predictive and epidemic models of Covid-19. There has been an outpouring of modeling work published in journals and in archives predicting virus effects. We will go through many of these models and evaluate methods and assumptions to learn how to better critique models.
BIME 591C
Facilitators: Andrew Berry & Matthew Hong
Wednesdays, 12:30-1:20
Title: Participatory Design in the Age of Digital Health
Course Description: Designing effective patient-centered technologies requires all stakeholders (including patients, caregivers, clinicians and many relevant stakeholders) to participate in the creative design process, thus enabling the infusion of their values, skills and knowledge in the final designed outcomes. We call this Participatory Design (PD). While PD relies on a range of in-person research activities, the recent pandemic has disrupted the status quo, forcing researchers to adapt to new constraints that come with running PD activities (e.g., design workshops) entirely through online channels. This course invites students to learn about fundamental concepts in PD, how to apply them in various care settings as well as contribute new knowledge that can be used toward doing PD in the age of digital health.
December 21-December 25, 2020
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Mike Hairfield, Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing 2021: Perspectives and Concerns Regarding “Ground Truth” and “Gold Standard” as Applied to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Health Sciences, UW BIME
Dymek C, Kim B, Melton GB, Payne TH, Singh H, Hsiao CJ. Building the evidence-base to reduce electronic health record-related clinician burden. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2020 Dec 19:ocaa238. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa238. Online ahead of print. PMID: 33340326
December 7-December 11, 2020
NEWS
Caring for Caregivers Online (COCO), led by Weichao Yuwen and Will Kearns, was awarded funding through the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund to support the development of an AI-augmented tele-nursing platform to assist family caregivers.
November 30-December 4, 2020
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
December 10, 2020: Gilmer Valdes, PhD
Title: Expert-Augmented Machine Learning
Abstract: Machine Learning is proving invaluable across disciplines. However, its success is often limited by the quality and quantity of available data, while its adoption is limited by the level of trust afforded by given models. Human vs. machine performance is commonly compared empirically to decide whether a certain task should be performed by a computer or an expert. In reality, the optimal learning strategy may involve combining the complementary strengths of man and machine. Here we present Expert-Augmented Machine Learning (EAML)1, an automated method that guides the extraction of expert knowledge and its integration into machine-learned models. Using RuleFit and a large dataset of intensive care patient data to derive 126 decision rules that predict hospital mortality. Using an online platform, we asked fifteen clinicians to assess the relative risk of the subpopulation defined by each rule compared to the total sample. We compared the clinician-assessed risk to the empirical risk and found that while clinicians agreed with the data in most cases, there were notable exceptions were they over- or under-estimated the true risk. Studying the rules with greatest disagreement, we identified problems with the training data, including one miscoded variable and one hidden confounder. Filtering the rules based on the extent of disagreement between clinicians and empirical risk, we improved performance on out-of-sample data and were able to train with less data. EAML provides a platform for automated creation of problem-specific priors which help build robust and dependable machine learning models in critical applications.
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Yue Guo*, Wei Qiu*, Yizhong Wang, and Trevor Cohen (* denotes equal contribution). Automated Lay Language Summarization of Biomedical Scientific Reviews. Accepted paper, Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21).
Yifan Wu, Justin Mower, Devika Subramanian, and Trevor Cohen. Prediction of Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability to Drugs with FDA Adverse Event Report Derived Embeddings. Abstract accepted for podium presentation at the AMIA 2021 Virtual Informatics Summit.
Drs. Oleg Zaslavsky and Annie Chen, along with collaborator Dr. Kimiko Domoto-Reilly, will receive an Innovation Award from the Garvey Institute for Brain Health Solutions to develop an online intervention for older adults who are caregivers of persons with Lewy body dementias. https://gibhs.psychiatry.uw.edu/current-projects/
Chen, A. T., Chu, F., Teng, A. K., Han, S., Lin, S.-Y., Demiris, G., Zaslavsky, O. (accepted). Virtual Online Communities for Aging Life Experiences (VOCALE): A social networking intervention to promote problem solving about health management. Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine.
November 16-20, 2020
NEWS
Andrew M. Simms, BIME PhD ’11, has joined the AstraZeneca Patient Safety Center of Excellence as a Senior Scientist. He will be focused on Safety Informatics for the AZD1222 COVID-19 vaccine project team.
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
November 26, 2020: Thanksgiving-no Class
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Backonja U. Understanding Support for a Nursing Informatics Leadership Pipeline: An ANI Emerging Leader Project. Comput Inform Nurs. 2020;38(11):543-544. doi:10.1097/CIN.0000000000000698
November 9-13, 2020
NEWS
The SOARing Project was highlighted in the recently released AHRQ Year in Review Report (page 12 of report)- https://digital.ahrq.gov/sites/default/files/docs/page/2019-year-in-review.pdf
Team members included several BIME faculty and students: Andrea Hartzler, George Demiris, Andrew Teng and Anne Turner (PI).
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
November 19, 2020:
Speaker: Josh Herbeck, PhD
Title: TBD
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Jeehoon Jang, a Clinical Informatics fellow, presented a poster at BMJ International Forum on Quality & Safety in Healthcare held in Copenhagen, Denmark last Thursday (11/5) and will present the same poster at AMIA 2020 Symposium next Monday (11/16).
Title: “On-Demand, Mobile Clinical Decision Support Delivering “What-to-Know” Applied to ACC AHA Pre-Operative Guideline”
Luo, M.D. Johnson, F.L. Nkoy, S. He, and B.L. Stone. Automatically Explaining Machine Learning Prediction Results on Asthma Hospital Visits in Asthmatic Patients: Secondary Analysis. JMIR Medical Informatics, 2020
2020 AAMC Lean Serve Lead Annual Meeting, November 16, 2020 2-3pm Eastern, (11am-12pm Pacific)
Addressing Institutionalized Racism in Academic Medicine
In the 19th century, medical beliefs based on theories of racial biological differences served to validate racism across institutional structures of American society. Research has shown that many of those racial myths linger in medicine today and contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in medicine. This session will explore historical racist beliefs that remain, how misinformation is perpetuated, and how automatic associations and hidden biases unintentionally influence patient care. Two institutions will highlight steps they have taken to address bias, stereotypes and misinformation in their curriculum, daily interactions, and practice of medicine.
Learning Objectives:
• Identify false beliefs about race from the past that continue to influence medicine today.
• Identify methods to address hidden biases, stereotypes, and misinformation that contribute to inequity.
• Highlight institutional interventions to dispel racist misinformation in medicine and teach antiracist practices.
Speaker(s): Ann-Gel Palermo Brenda Pereda Janice Sabin
Facilitator: Laura Castillo-Page
October 26-October 30, 2020
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
November 5, 2020:
Speaker: Brian Piening, PhD
Title: Molecular Tracking of SARS-CoV-2 in Oregon and Beyond
Abstract: Until the availability of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, molecular diagnostics represent some of our most effective tools in the COVID-19 pandemic. Here I will discuss work from our group in launching rapid diagnostics, SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing and large-scale COVID-19 serological testing in the Providence Health System. These efforts have revealed a wealth of data regarding the molecular trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 in Oregon and I will discuss ongoing efforts linking SARS-CoV-2 molecular information with electronic health record data to better predict outcomes.
Speaker Bio: : Brian Piening, PhD is technical director for clinical genomics in the Providence Molecular Genomics Laboratory, which provides clinical genomics testing across the multi-state nonprofit Providence/Swedish Health Network. Dr. Piening is also research faculty at the Providence Cancer Institute in Portland, OR and his research laboratory utilizes multi-omic and computational methods to develop predictive and prognostic biomarkers associated with cancer immunotherapeutics. Dr. Piening performed his PhD training in Molecular and Cellular Biology at UW and Fred Hutch and his postdoctoral training in the department of genetics at Stanford University. He has recently contributed to several large multi-omic studies including the NIH Human Microbiome Project and the NASA Twins Study.
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
October 19-October 23, 2020
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
October 29: Speaker: Jason Moore, PhD, University of Pennsylvania
Title: Accessible Artificial Intelligence for Data Science
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has finally emerged as a useful tool for big data analytics. This is due to decades of research that have provided powerful algorithms and the availability of plentiful computing resources. Despite these advances, AI is not widely accessible due to a steep learning curve and the expense and black box nature of software provided by commercial vendors. In response to this need, we have developed an accessible, open-source, and user-friendly AI system at the University of Pennsylvania (PennAI) to bring AI and automated machine learning technology to everyone who wants to incorporate this technology into their big data analytics agenda.
Speaker Bio: Jason Moore is the Edward Rose Professor of Informatics and Director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics. He also serves as Senior Associate Dean for Informatics and Chief of the Division of Informatics in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics. He came to Penn in 2015 from Dartmouth where he was Director of the Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Sciences. Prior to Dartmouth he served as Director of the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University where he launched their first high-performance computer. He has a Ph.D. in Human Genetics and an M.S. in Applied Statistics from the University of Michigan. He leads an active NIH-funded research program focused on the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms for the analysis of complex biomedical data. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), and an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal BioData Mining.
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
PUBLICATIONS
Shefali Haldar, Yoojung Kim, Sonali R. Mishra, Andrea L. Hartzler, Ari H Pollack, and Wanda Pratt. 2020. The Patient Advice System: A Technology Probe Study to Enable Peer Support in the Hospital. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW2, Article 112 (October 2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3415183
Lauren Snyder, Ayan Anandkumar Saraf, Regina Casanova-Perez, Sarah E. Connor, Sheba George, Amelia Wang, Darwin Jones, Georgina Mendoza, John Gore, Mark S. Litwin and Andrea Hartzler. Visualization Co-Design with Prostate Cancer Survivors who have Limited Graph Literacy. Accepted for VAHC 2020.
Regina Casanova-Perez, Calvin Apodaca, Cezanne Lane, Drishti Vidyarthi, Erin Beneteau, Steven R. Rick, Colleen Emmenegger, Cindy Schairer, Janice Sabin, Wanda Pratt, Nadir Weibel, Andrea L Hartzler. Patients’ perspectives on implicit bias in clinical interactions with healthcare providers. Poster presentation at Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) 2020.
Steven R. Rick, Colleen Emmenegger, Cynthia E. Schairer, Alex Andreiu, Sam Fleet, Kimberly Sladek, James Ricketts, Calvin Apodaca, Regina Casanova-Perez, Cezanne Lane, Erin Beneteau, Drishti Vidyarthi, Janice Sabin, Wanda Pratt, Andrea Hartzler, Nadir Weibel. Seeing Beyond Patient-Centeredness: Searching for a Signal of Bias and Empathy in Patient-Provider Interaction. Poster presentation at Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) 2020.
Luo, C.L. Nau, W.W. Crawford, M. Schatz, R.S. Zeiger, E. Rozema, and C. Koebnick. Developing a Predictive Model for Asthma-Related Hospital Encounters in Patients with Asthma in a Large Integrated Healthcare System: Secondary Analysis. JMIR Medical Informatics, 2020
Tong, A.I. Messinger, and G. Luo. Testing the Generalizability of an Automated Method for Explaining Machine Learning Predictions on Asthma Patients’ Asthma Hospital Visits to an Academic Healthcare System. IEEE Access, 2020.
Adam Wilcox: article that came out of an interview with The Verge:
NEWS
UW jumps two spots to No. 8 in US News Best Global Universities ranking
The University of Washington moved up two spots to No. 8 on the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities rankings, released Tuesday. The UW maintained its No. 2 ranking among U.S. public institutions. In addition, 10 subjects at the UW are ranked in the top 10 in the world, including infectious diseases (No. 6), immunology (No. 6) and social sciences and public health (No. 7) — all fields that are playing critical roles in the COVID-19 pandemic response.
https://www.washington.edu/news/
October 12-October 16, 2020
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
October 22: Speaker: TBD
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
OTHER
The UW School of Medicine AI Seminars
We are excited to announce the first AI in Medicine Seminar featuring Prof. Sean Mooney with an introduction by School of Medicine Dean and UW Medicine CEO Dr. Paul Ramsey and Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Chair, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch. Please register at this link.
The meeting will be held on Zoom: October 19th, Monday at 1:00-2:30pm; https://uw-phi.zoom.us/j/91367210948
October 5-October 9, 2020
UPCOMING LECTURES AND SEMINARS
BIME 590A – Biomedical & Health Informatics Lecture Series
Thursday, 11:00am-11:50am, Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/92138508055
October 15: Speaker: TBD
BIME 591B – Reproducibility in Research
Tuesdays, 11:30-12:20: Zoom: https://washington.zoom.us/j/98333515649
Facilitators: Hannah Burkhardt, Jake Portanova (BHI PhD Students) with Trevor Cohen (faculty sponsor)
Guest Speaker 10/13/2020: Dr. Ariel Rokem from the eScience reproducibility in science group
OTHER
The UW School of Medicine AI Seminars
We are excited to announce the first AI in Medicine Seminar featuring Prof. Sean Mooney with an introduction by School of Medicine Dean and UW Medicine CEO Dr. Paul Ramsey and Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Chair, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch. Please register at this link.
The meeting will be held on Zoom: October 19th, Monday at 1:00-2:30pm; https://uw-phi.zoom.us/j/91367210948
September 28-October 2, 2020
PUBLICATIONS
Choi, Y.K., Demiris, G., & Thompson, H.J. (in press). Use of an Internet-of-Things smart home system for healthy aging of older adults in their residential setting: A feasibility study. JMIR Aging.
Choi, Y.K., Thompson, H.J. & Demiris, G. (in press). Internet-of-Things (IoT) smart home technology to support aging-in-place: older adults’ perceptions and attitudes. Journal of Gerontological Nursing.
OTHER
Microsoft is hiring interns for next summer. The job description is posted here:
It is a rather generic job posting for all of Microsoft, but the Healtcare NeXT team, has internship openings. We work on building an open source FHIR server, DICOM server and related tools. We are part of Microsoft Research which allows for some fun activities during the summer and exposure to other research teams.
If anyone is interested, they can reach out to Jared Erwin, erwinj@uw.edu, but will also need to apply online using the link above. You can mention the Healthcare NeXT team, and the hiring manager is Joyce Cunningham.
September 21-September 25, 2020
NEWS
A message from Paul Ramsey, MD: After 10 years of serving as Associate Dean for Curriculum Dr. Michael Ryan is stepping down from his role effective 9/16/20. He recently moved from Seattle to Spokane where he has continued his outstanding work. I am pleased to report that Dr. Ryan will continue working with the curriculum team making additional improvements and changes to the curriculum starting with the 2022-23 academic year. Dr. Mark Whipple, assistant to the dean for clinical education, has agreed to serve as the acting associate dean for curriculum. In the near future, I will announce the search process for a permanent associate dean for curriculum. Please join me in thanking Dr. Ryan for his superb contributions and remarkable vision.
Trevor Cohen MBChB, PhD, received a Notification of Award for from the National Institute on Aging indicating the award of a $442 K grant to develop novel approaches to quantify the coherence of language produced by patients with Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type, in order to facilitate the study of fluctuations in lucidity over time that have been observed in this condition. The award is for is a multi-PI grant with Serguei Pakhomov, PhD at the University of Minnesota and Trevor as the two PIs.
Project Description: The focus of the proposed project is to enable automated detection and analysis of episodes of unexpected lucidity in individuals with late-stage dementia in which the individual long thought to have succumbed to dementia and lost most of his or her cognitive abilities temporarily regains the ability to communicate in a clear and coherent fashion. The very low frequency and unexpected nature of these episodes make it challenging to capture objective evidence in the form of audio or video recordings of these events needed to enable systematic and comprehensive investigations. Thus, it is necessary to develop technological solutions for automated linguistic analysis that can be used for long-term continuous monitoring of individuals in late stages of dementia. In this feasibility project, we will develop technology to address two challenging issues: a) accurate conversion of continuous speech to text, and b) automated analysis of the text to measure the degree of coherence.
Dr. Anne Turner, Dr. Uba Backonja, and fellow investigators were awarded supplemental funding by the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health to integrate data and training on COVID-19 and related social determinants of health into their project, SHARE-NW: Solutions in Health Analytics for Rural Equity across the Northwest.
Casey Overby Taylor, PhD, received one of the NIH/NHGRI-funded Genomic Innovator Awards this year.
It will provide some funding for Casey and team members over the next 5 years to study genomic clinical decision support.
The story from Hopkins BME is here: https://www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/news/casey-overby-taylor-earns-genomic-innovator-award/
OTHER
Houda Benlhabib, PhD, announced the birth of her baby girl “Noor” born on 09/20/2020: 8 pounds and 1.7 oz, mom and baby are healthy.
September 14-September 18, 2020
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
Thomas H Payne, Lue Ping Zhao, Calvin Le, Peter Wilcox, Troy Yi, Jesse Hinshaw, Duncan Hussey, Alex Kostrinsky-Thomas, Malika Hale, John Brimm, Fuki M Hisama. Electronic health records contain dispersed risk factor information that could be used to prevent breast and ovarian cancer. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, ocaa152, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocaa152
Fox S, Menking A, Eschler J, Backonja U. Modules Over Models: Participatory Explorations of the Menstrual Tracking Application. ToCHI special issue on Special Issue on HCI and the Body: Reimagining Women’s Health). 2020; 27(4): article 22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397178
OTHER
We are growing the Informatics team at DOH (Shoreline) Please consider joining us and helping in the COVID response.
Bryant Thomas Karras M.D.
Chief Informatics Officer
Office of the State Health Officer/Chief Science Officer
Washington State Department of Health
bryant.karras@doh.wa.gov
Here are the direct links and blurbs:
Informatics Specialist (all levels)
Public Health Informatics Specialist (Epidemiologist) positions will support development, maintenance, operation, enhancement, and configuration of data systems and informatics capabilities to address the needs of the Department of Health and in service to the 35 Local Health Jurisdictions, 29 federally-recognized Tribes, and other public health and healthcare sector partners across Washington State. These include laboratory and case reporting, systems which support case management and case and contact investigation, and other critical informatics and data science capabilities that support all aspects of the COVID-19 response in Washington State.
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/washington/doh/jobs/2855022
Informatics System Support Supervisor WMS1:
COVID-19 Informatics Systems Support Unit Lead will support priority capacity in COVID-19 response by serving as the Systems Support Unit Supervisor. The Systems Support Unit supports the ongoing surveillance system design, development, and integration tasks. This position leads teams charged with maintaining and operating key data systems and capabilities, and leading process improvements and system enhancements for state-led surveillance applications. They are responsible for a staff of eleven (11) professionals and will coordinate with private and public sector partners to expand surveillance capacity within the state.
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/washington/doh/jobs/2861017
RHINO Program Manager WMS1:
Rapid Health Information NetwOrk (RHINO) Program Manager is the program manager for the Rapid Health Information NetwOrk (RHINO) program, Washington state’s syndromic surveillance program. This position has the authority to act on behalf of the agency to public and elected officials, media, and others, regarding issues of high visibility or sensitivity. The RHINO Program Manager will conduct supervisory activities, and coordinate public health surveillance activities for syndromic surveillance, for communicable diseases and non-communicable conditions. This position is directly responsible for supervising professional-level staff responsible for meeting federal grant deliverables around developing, sustaining, and enhancing Washington’s syndromic surveillance capacity. The RHINO Program Manager will coordinate efforts with cross-agency workgroups and other key stakeholders to ensure robust data systems are in place to address syndromic surveillance needs throughout the Department of Health and in service to Local Health Jurisdictions and Tribal health authorities.
https://www.governmentjobs.com/careers/washington/doh/jobs/2860963