Chair’s Message
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
Postdoctoral Fellowship Position Available
We are currently accepting applications for a postdoctoral training fellowship for the 2019-20 academic year. The fellowship is funded by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Biomedical Informatics Research Training Grant. More information and application materials are available here.
Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education Newsletter
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
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
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/