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Clinical Informatics


UW Medicine Information Technology Services (UW ITS) provides a range of clinical computing services including electronic health records, clinical data repositories, financial and billing systems, educational systems, patient portals, reporting and clinical decision support systems, and systems to support research.  This group supports the use of information technology to support the clinical, teaching, and research missions of UW Medicine.

UW Medicine ITS provides the computing support for UW Medical Center, Harborview Medical Center, Northwest Hospital and Medical Center, a network of twelve UW Neighborhood Clinics, UW Physicians, and Airlift Northwest. ITS has over 620 staff supporting among key efforts and systems: electronic medical records (Cerner inpatient, Epic outpatient except for Cerner in the Cancer Center), analytics (McKesson, Epic and Caradigm data warehouses), research computing, business systems (billing, finance, payroll, etc.), project management, security, systems administration, training and desktop support. ITS supports over 10,000 desktops, 1,500 real and virtual servers and over 500 separate applications.

Our clinical informaticians and fellowship trainees support our Chief Medical Officer’s efforts towards Practice Transformation.  Informaticians have helped with strategies for Empanelment, development of clinical pathways, creation of clinical decision support, user interface redesign, and security analysis.  We are starting to unleash the potential of clinical data towards improving health care throughout the enterprise with newer informatics techniques such as value analysis, data mining, predictive analytics, population health data visualization, and precision medicine.

The following Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics Core Faculty serve in key roles within  ITS: Peter Tarczy-Hornoch, as the ITS BIME liaison, Sean Mooney as Chief Research Information Officer, Adam Wilcox as Chief Analytics Officer, Mike Leu as Clinical Informatics Fellowship Director, Gang Luo working on Predictive Analytics, and Meliha Yetisgen working on text mining. In addition, Jim Fine, the ITS CIO, David Chou, the ITS CTO, Tom Payne, the ITS CMIO, Paul Sutton, the Cerner physician lead, and Jane Fellner, the Epic Physician Lead are all extended faculty members of BHI. A number of other BHI faculty and students collaborate with ITS to pursue clinical informatics and translational informatics research projects.