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Duke
Broadcast Link: Seminar
Abstract:
The HL7® International standard FHIR® is becoming one of the most interesting topics in the healthcare industry. This presentation will discuss why this interest continues to grow. FHIR is an enabler of interoperability. First, a detailed description of FHIR will be presented – what it is and what it does. We will then discuss two other related standards, SMART on FHIR (a standard for APIs using FHIR) and CDS Hooks (a standard enabling Clinical Decision Support). Finally, the presentation will discuss other key activities relating to FHIR and healthcare standard activities including Bulk FHIR, the FHIR Acceleration Program, and new related activities in HL7.
Biosketch:
Ed Hammond, PhD, is the Director of the Duke Center for Health Informatics, Clinical and Translation Sciences Institute (CTSI). He is also the Director of the Master of Management in Clinical informatics (MMCi) degree program in the School of Medicine; and the Director for Applied Informatics Research, Duke Health Technology Solutions. Dr. Hammond serves as a Professor in the Departments of Community and Family Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Nursing and Fuqua School of Business and is the Chair Emeritus of HL7 International.
UNC-Chapel Hill
Broadcast Link: Seminar (There is content. Scroll to bottom and click play.)
Abstract:
IntraHealth International, works in low-and middle-income countries to apply information science and technologies to support national healthcare systems. Currently, Intrahealth is applying machine learning techniques to the big data available to produce information that can support the program teams and the countries they serve. This seminar will provide an overview of the rise of global digital health to support achieving universal health coverage from the evolution of open source tools to advanced applications of machine learning for deeper analysis and answering more profound questions. The first sprint, building a data lake for our program in Uganda and performing hypothesis free and problem driven research and future directions made possible by this early work will be discussed.
Biosketch:
David D. Potenziani, PhD, is currently Senior Informatics Advisor at IntraHealth International. He has worked in the US, Africa, and Asia with groups to develop and extend the application of digital health technologies and approaches. He swims in an array of ICT domains: mHealth, eLearning, eHealth policy, human resources for health, and machine learning. He came to IntraHealth after two decades at the University of North Carolina, serving in both the schools of Public Health and Medicine. He is a recovering historian and a writer of nerd science fiction.
Amy Finnegan, PhD, is currently Senior Data Scientist at IntraHealth International. She is a demographer and data scientist with 10 years of experience working in global health, development, and data science on four continents. Dr. Finnegan has collected and analyzed primary quantitative and qualitative data on pediatric HIV disclosure, positive parenting, and maternal and newborn survival innovations in East and West Africa. She has led and supported interdisciplinary research teams to design data collection tools and analysis plans and to apply machine learning and other creative research design methods to big, secondary data sets in global health in Uganda, Kenya, and Indonesia on topics such as family planning and maternal mortality. She co-leads Duke’s Big Data for Reproductive Health research team.
UNC-Charlotte; Presented from Duke University where Dr. Zadrozny is currently on sabbatical.
Broadcast: Seminar (Scroll to bottom and click play.)
Abstract
There are over 30 thousand medical treatments guidelines on PubMed. However, not much is known about the properties of this corpus. For example, we do not know how often and to what degree guidelines (for the same condition) disagree.
This seminar will discuss challenges of building programs extracting information from the text of medical guidelines. A few case studies will be presented, including (1) extraction of condition-action sequences, (2) contradictions and disagreements in guidelines for the same condition. Work shown will include computational architecture for solving some of the underlying technical problems, including a searchable repository currently being built. (This is joint work with H.Hematialam and L.Garbayo, and was partly supported by IBM Faculty Research Grant).
Biosketch
Wlodek Zadrozny, PhD is a visiting professor with the Duke data science program (MIDS), and Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte. Until 2013 he was a researcher and manager at IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab in Yorktown Heights NY. Dr. Zadrozny has about 30-years experience in natural language processing, and one of the highlights of his career was the Jeopardy! winning program IBM Watson. His research focuses on computational models of technical text, including text of patents and medical treatment guidelines.
ECU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Kidney transplantation is the preferred treatment for patients with end stage renal disease. Currently, there are over 90,000 patients awaiting a kidney transplant (as of 1/23/2020). On average, 3,000 new patients are added to the kidney waiting list each month. The median wait time for an individual’s first kidney transplant is approximately 4 years and can vary depending on health, compatibility and availability of organs. Given the success of kidney transplantation, the demand far outweighs the supply.
In 2014 a new kidney allocation system was developed to increase equity in allocation of deceased donor kidneys, for highly sensitized candidates and ethnic minorities, and reduce the number of kidneys recovered but not used (often called the “discard rate”). To accomplish this, the new system prioritizes candidates based on “longevity matching” (better use of available kidneys) as well as sensitivity status and waiting time on dialysis.
Although the new system has improved equity, there are challenges. The models used for allocation of deceased donor organs are based on risk scores and predictions that have low predictive accuracy. Moreover, the discard rate remains high. Further work is needed to explore ways to improve the allocation system. We believe artificial intelligence may help given the complexity of the problem.
The goal of this talk is to present the clinical framework wherein artificial intelligence may provide a better solution.
Biosketch
William Irish, PhD MSc, is a Research Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Surgery and Co-Director of the Big Data & Analytic Research Cluster at East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. Dr. Irish has been involved in health-outcomes and clinical research both in academia and industry for over 25 years; applying various methods to evaluate the effectiveness of health care interventions on clinical and economic outcomes. Dr. Irish has collaborated with investigators internationally, implemented large-scale database analyses and directed analysis/programming teams. He specializes in outcomes research, clinical trial methodology, statistical modeling and prediction, and large-scale database and claims analyses. His major research interest consists of: (1) identification of important prognostic factors of disease progression and clinical outcomes, including validation of biomarkers; (2) developing statistical models and assessing their clinical utility; and (3) designing randomized controlled trials, specifically in low incidence/rare conditions with specific reference to subject enrichment strategies. Dr. Irish is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Society of Transplantation and the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcome Research. Dr. Irish is currently Associate Editor for Clinical Transplantation.
Duke
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Big data has changed the biomedical landscape from research to clinical care to population health. Dr. Tenenbaum will describe the “learning health system” paradigm in which clinical data is used to inform research. She will illustrate the approach with examples from top academic medical centers leveraging electronic health record data to stratify patient populations. She will also describe the North Carolina’s Healthy Opportunities pilots, which aim analogously to develop a “learning Department of Health and Human Services”, using data generated in the course of providing services to inform health policy. Finally, the speaker will contextualize these approaches by addressing the important ethical, legal, and social issues that they raise.
Biosketch
Jessie Tenenbaum, PhD serves as the Chief Data Officer (CDO) for DHHS, where she oversees data strategy across the Department, enabling the use information to inform and evaluate policy and improve the health and well-being of residents of North Carolina. Prior to taking on the role of CDO, Dr. Tenenbaum was a founding faculty member of the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within Duke University’s Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics where her research focused on informatics methods to enable precision medicine, particularly in mental health. She is also interested in ethical, legal, and social issues around big data and precision medicine. Nationally, Dr. Tenenbaum is a member of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine as well as a number of editorial and advisory boards including Nature Scientific Data and Briefings in Bioinformatics.
UNC-Chapel Hill
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Personalized medicine is the data-driven, patient-specific tailoring of a therapy to an individual with the aim of maximizing efficacy and safety. By focusing care on the unique characteristics of each individual patient, personalized medicine has the potential to predict an individual’s susceptibility to certain diseases as well as their response to available therapies. As a result, individual patient care could improve via focused preventative monitoring or access to second-and-third-line therapies that are better suited to the individual than traditional first-line approaches. Genetic variation plays a lynchpin role in personalized medicine approaches. The role of genetic variation in disease susceptibility and drug response has been established in numerous therapeutic contexts. However, understanding the catalog of genetic variants which govern the progression of a specific disease or alter response to given therapeutic is an ongoing effort. Accessibility to large datasets of genetically profiled patients with associated clinical outcomes is critical to this effort. The Genomics England research environment is one such resource, encompassing over 100,000 sequenced genomes and clinical annotations from >85,000 participants. A multitude of cancers and rare diseases are represented in the database with information for both probands and relatives. This seminar will discuss the benefits provided and challenges posed to informaticists working with Genomics England data.
Biosketch
Jeran Stratford, MS, PhD, is a Senior Bioinformaticist at Q² Solutions. Dr. Stratford’s work focuses on performing analyses of next generation sequencing targeted panels. He develops and improves bioinformatics tools to analyze NGS data and collaborates with research and development to develop custom analysis for new products. Dr. Stratford earned a PhD in Pharmacology and a Masters in Biostatistics from UNC-CH.
Wake Forest University
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The importance of patients’ engagement in healthcare is gaining focus, although Dr. Warner V. Slack had emphasized the importance of this very issue 40 years ago. Biomedical Informatics plays a crucial role in enabling and incorporating multimodal and ubiquitous data. This seminar will introduce three use cases that exemplify informatics-driven patient engagement: (1) Assisting participants finding clinical trials using machine learning based conversational agents to identify clinical trials through web pages, text and phone; (2) Implementing a machine learning based natural language processing tool to identify genomic sequencing discussions with patients from the EHR progress notes; and (3) Using a SMART on FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) based care plan generation tool called COMPASS to engage oncology patients.
Biosketch
Umit Topaloglu, PhD, is the Associate Director of Informatics for the Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center and Center for Biomedical Informatics. He has been promoting clinical research informatics solutions and their Electronic Health Record (EHR) integrations across the translational research spectrum that utilizes semantic interoperability and standard capabilities (e.g. HL7 and recently FHIR). His research aims to improve secondary data use of EHR’s for clinical and translational research by utilizing Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Ultimately, standardizing clinical (and other) data to publicly available coding systems will foster semantic integration and interoperability among the systems towards biomedical advancements. He has served in informatics leadership positions on several large scale/multi institutional efforts including National Children’s Study, the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, Claude Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, and the Clinical and Translational Science Award Informatics Program since 2010, starting in his previous institution and currently at Wake Forest.
UNC-Charlotte
Broadcast: Recording not available
Abstract
Among those with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), future vascular event risk varies widely. Ability to predict individual risks enables more refined approaches to risk management. This validation study assesses performance of the SMART prediction model in predicting 10-year vascular event risks. Data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink consists of adults registered with UK National Health Service primary care providers diagnosed with coronary, cerebrovascular, peripheral, and/or aortic ASCVD. Exposure variables include demographics, medical history, and clinical measurements, while the outcome is first post cohort-entry occurrence of myocardial infarction, stroke, or cardiovascular death. The calibration and discrimination achieved by the SMART model was not dissimilar to performance at internal validation. It slightly under-predicted risk among lower risk groups, but clinical utility was apparent across potential treatment thresholds. Results remained consistent in sensitivity analyses. The SMART model has utility in the context of routine UK primary care-based secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease.
Biosketch
Dr. Laura H. Gunn received her PhD in Statistics and Decision Sciences from Duke University, during which time she also held a research training fellowship in Biostatistics with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Laura is currently Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences and Director of Health Analytics at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), as well as Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London’s (ICL) School of Public Health (SPH) within the Faculty of Medicine. Prior to UNCC, Laura was Associate Professor of Public Health in Biostatistics, Department Chair of Health Sciences, and founding Program Director of Public Health at Stetson University, where she led the development of the undergraduate minor and major in Public Health, as well as co-developed undergraduate and graduate Data/Applied Analytics programs and received the University’s Community Partnership of the Year Award for establishing partnerships with Florida Hospital and Florida Department of Health. Additional prior positions include Associate Director of the Global eHealth Unit within ICL’s SPH. During this time, she also served as Lead Biostatistician for Research Design Service London at ICL. Laura was Biostatistics Director and Interim Associate Dean of Georgia Southern University’s Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health (JPHCOPH), where she was among the founding faculty to develop masters and doctoral programs primarily in Biostatistics and Epidemiology within JPHCOPH and served on the core leadership team for Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH) accreditation. She received the JPHCOPH Faculty Awards of Excellence for Teaching & Mentoring, as well as for Service. Laura served a term on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee; and, a sample of additional service roles includes: Treasurer for the American Statistical Association Georgia Chapter; Chair and Program Committee Chair of the Biopharmaceutical Applied Statistics Symposium; and reviewer for various statistics and health journals, as well as US and UK nationally-funded grants. Her research accounts for 45 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and technical reports, as well as serving as a PI or co-I on funded external grants and contracts totaling over $6.5 million, including National Institutes of Health (US) and National Institute for Health Research (UK) grants. A sample of her publications includes such journals as PLoS ONE, American Journal of Gastroenterology, Annals of Family Medicine, British Journal of Dermatology, Pediatrics, Biostatistics, Biometrics, International Journal of Integrated Care, and Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; and, she has over 150 invited and contributed regional, national, and international presentations.
ECU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Despite the evidence that physical activity and proper nutrition are beneficial to a healthy lifestyle, many individuals struggle with adhering to these behaviors. As technology advances and becomes an ever-present part of today’s society, it is critical to understand how technology can be used to promote healthy lifestyles for chronic disease prevention and management and improvement of quality of life. One such strategy is the use of social media for dissemination of healthy lifestyles. This talk will focus on two interventions, Pirates for HEALTH and Project LIFT-Off, that use social media to promote healthy lifestyles.
Biosketch
Bhibha M. Das earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a Masters in Public Health from University of Illinois at Springfield, and a Doctorate in Kinesiology and Community Health from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Bhibha is employed currently at East Carolina University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology. Prior to her academic career, Bhibha worked in the field of public health, first at the Illinois Department of Public Health and then at Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc. Dr. Das’ research interests include physical activity promotion for improvements in quality of life in worksites and underserved populations.
NCCU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Dr. Edwards will review 20 years of research from his laboratory and describe the current state of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) research. SCD is the most common genetic disorder of blood characterized by frequent and debilitating acute pain crises and chronic persistent pain. There is increased research interest into the interaction between biological, cognitive, and affective factors influencing onset, maintenance and resolution of chronic pains associated with SCD. Dr. Edwards is presenting “part 2” to the NCCU presentation by his colleague Dr. John Sollers in November, 2019 that introduced the Bio-Psych-Social Model.
Biosketch
Christopher L. Edwards, Ph.D., BCB, IABMCP is a Clinical Psychologist and Research Psychoneuroendocrinologist who retired from Duke University Medical Center in February 2018 and joined NCCU shortly thereafter. In the departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, Dr. Edwards was the Medical Director of the Biofeedback Laboratory, and Director of the Chronic Pain Management Program at Duke University Medical Center. He has spent almost more than two decades studying the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of chronic disorders where pain is a primary symptom, and factors that influence health outcomes among Black and other minority populations.
Dr. Edwards has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles book chapters and other contributions to science, and has given more 500 national and international professional presentations. He received a lifetime achievement award for his contributions to understanding biopsychosocial factors associated with Sickle Cell Disease. He is the recipient of many other awards and accolades at the local, national and international levels. He is often interviewed and quoted in reputable non-scientific publications like the Wall Street Journal as well as local and national new publications and television.
Over the past twenty years, Dr. Edwards has held concurrent faculty positions in the Department of Psychiatry, Division of Medical Psychology and Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology at Duke University Medical Center. He also maintained an appointment in the Durham Veterans Hospital, the Duke Pain and Palliative Care Center, and served as training faculty member in the Duke Residency Training Program, the Clinical Psychology Internship Program, and the Duke University’s graduate program in clinical psychology. He also held academic appointments as adjunct faculty at North Carolina Central University, North Carolina A&T State University, and North Carolina State University to name a few, and was most noted for his multidisciplinary approach to science, clinical practice, and educating the next generation of professional.
Duke
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Digital biomarkers are digitally collected data that are transformed into indicators of health outcomes. As wearable technologies are being increasingly used for digital biomarker discovery, clinical research, and healthcare, it is critical to understand their accuracy and determine how measurement errors may affect research conclusions and impact healthcare decision-making. Accuracy of wearable technologies has been a hotly debated topic in both the research and popular science literature. This seminar will discuss the digital biomarker discovery process and our recent study on validating wearable sensors for clinical use.
Biosketch
Brinnae Bent is currently a 4th year PhD Candidate in the BIG IDEAS Lab under Dr. Jessilyn Dunn. Brinnae’s thesis work focuses on learning digital biomarkers from longitudinal wearable sensor data for chronic disease diagnosis and management. She is currently working on mining digital biomarkers for glycemic variability in prediabetic populations using a combination of machine learning and time series methods. To learn more about Brinnae’s work, please go to her website runsdata.org or follow her on Twitter @RunsData.
Duke
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The reality is that the vast majority of healthcare happens in the community and not the hospital or doctor’s office. Many of our fellow citizens depend upon services delivered by Community or Faith-based Organizations (CBOs) yet those organizations are often working in the dark because they operate outside of the HIPAA-covered healthcare world.
The development of the CMS Blue Button 2.0 API blazed a trail that has been followed by new Interoperability regulations that require payers to provide patient access to APIs. This enables patients to share their health information with applications or services they trust.
This seminar will look at how a pilot project demonstrated how data from a Health Information Exchange could be made available to CBOs under the control of Medicaid beneficiaries.
Biosketch
As the CMS Blue Button Innovator and Entrepreneur-In-Residence, Mark Scrimshire designed and built the Blue Button 2.0 API for Medicare. Mark joins Onyx as Chief Interoperability Officer to promote the adoption of standards-based interoperability and access across Healthcare. Mark is active in the HL7 community and is the author of the HL7 Da Vinci Payer Data Exchange Implementation Guide. He brings his passion for improving consumer access to their health information and his experience delivering solutions for Payers and global companies, such as 3M to Onyx as we build market-leading, secure platforms that deliver real interoperability at scale in healthcare.
UNC-CH
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
This seminar will focus on the research of the speaker. The current project focuses on multi-modal biomedical information retrieval and operationalizing real-time eye-tracking for gaze adaptive interfaces that improve retrieval processes for the user. One system, PATTIE (pattie.unc.edu) focuses on PubMed as an information domain and attempts to bring highly visual and spatial-semantic interactivity to biomedical literature search. This seminar talk will touch on the system architecture, ophthalmic neurophysiology and how it relates to eye tracking technology, remote eye tracking through the web camera, evaluating real-time classification for raw gaze data captured through the web camera, and the technical and psychophysiological limitations of these approaches.
Biosketch
Michael Ortiz is a National Library of Medicine predoctoral fellow in the Carolina Health Informatics Program, Michael was an associate in research in the Duke University Program in Genetics and Genomics before attending graduate school in 2017.
NCCU
Broadcast: Seminar (Scroll to bottom and on left, click play.)
Abstract
No more pandemics!! Ecologists have repeatedly pointed out that human activities (wildlife trade and wet markets) and human impact on the environment (deforestation, development, etc.) are bringing people and wildlife into ever increasing contact and setting us up for “spillover.” Following on the heels of Avian Influenza, HIV Aids, Nipah, and SARS, in 2020 COVID-19 has spread globally. Additionally, Bartonellosis, Lyme Borreliosis, Ebola and Zika microbes have taught the world the important One Health lessons. This presentation explains the concept of One Health and highlights how and why it is critical that animal, environmental, and human health workers develop collaborative working relationships “ahead” of public health emergencies to treat and to help prevent them. Dr. Stroud describes some of the “systems” challenges that have forced us into silos, and shares several arenas/examples of the critical global need for One Health at all levels of academia, research, policy and government. She illustrates the urgency of collaborative actions.
Recommended Pre-Session Reading:
COVID-19 and One Health, https://tinyurl.com/ycbx7xbn
One Health, a Ray of Hope for the Future
Stroud C, Pan European Networks: Science & Technology, Issue 24, September, 2017
Advancing a ‘One Health’ Approach to Promote Health at the Human-Animal-Environment Interface, APHA Policy Statement 201712, November 2017
One Health, One Welfare, One Planet, One Health Commission website, accessed July 24, 2019
Stroud C, Lindenmayer J, http://bit.ly/2YcTXKr
Preparing Society to create the world we need through One Health education
Lueddeke G et. al., SEEJPH 2016, Vol. 6. DOI 10.4119/UNIBI/SEEJPH-2016-122
Biosketch
Cheryl Stroud, DVM, PhD, is Executive Director of the One Health Commission. She received her DVM from Mississippi State University and PhD in Endocrine Physiology from NC State University. The One Health Commission is a non-profit organization chartered in Washington, D.C. and headquartered in central North Carolina. Dr. Stroud has enjoyed professional experiences in Industry, Academic Research / Teaching, Private Veterinary Practice and as a One Health practitioner. The One Health concept emerged in the US in the early 2000s and became more prominent in NC in 2010 when key veterinary, human, public and environmental health stakeholders came together in RTP to create and lead a North Carolina One Health Collaborative (NC OHC). Professionals from Duke University, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, NC State University, RTP, the NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and the NC Department of Public Health are in the collaborative.
As Executive Director of the One Health Commission, through strategic networks and partnerships, Dr. Stroud advocates worldwide for education about the full scope of and critical need for One Health at all levels of academia, research, clinical practice, government and policy. She refers to One Health as our “Ray of Hope for the Future.”
UNC-Charlotte
Broadcast: Seminar (Scroll to bottom and on left, click play.)
Abstract
This study aimed to provide a comprehensive workflow to identify top influential health misinformation of Zika on Twitter in 2016, reconstruct information dissemination networks of retweeting, contrast real from misinformation on various metrics, and investigate how Zika misinformation proliferated on social media during the Zika epidemic. There were significant differences of network metrics between real and misinformation groups. In general, misinformation network structures were more sophisticated than real group. This was substantial within-group variability, too. Dissemination networks of Zika misinformation differed substantially from real information on Twitter, indicating misinformation utilized distinct dissemination mechanisms from real information. The workflow can be adopted to study other health-related discussions on social media, such as the current COVID-19.
Biosketch
Dr. Shi Chen is currently an assistant professor of health informatics and analytics at UNC Charlotte. He earned his Ph.D. degrees from Penn State University in 2011 in the field of infectious disease dynamics. He completed his postdoc trainings in infectious disease epidemiology at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at University of Tennessee Knoxville and Comparative Medicine Institute at North Carolina State University before joining UNC Charlotte in 2016. His work on health-related misinformation has been supported by the Arthur W. Page Center for Communication.
ECU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
There is an urgent need to increase awareness regarding Type II diabetes (T2DM), a common, costly condition and a significant source of morbidity and mortality. Prediabetes, a potential precursor to T2DM, is also common. Many people with T2DM can self-manage their disease and many with prediabetes can avoid the disease altogether, with appropriate lifestyle changes. However, more than 25% of people with T2DM are unaware of their condition, as are the large majority of people with prediabetes. Race and ethnicity are also factors: African Americans, and other racial and ethnic minority groups are at higher risk for T2DM and its complications compared to non-Hispanic whites, placing them at greater risk for heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney disease and amputations.
The West Greenville Health Council (WGHC), a community-academic partnership, developed a social media marketing intervention, rooted in entertainment education, to raise diabetes awareness in a predominantly African American, economically depressed and socially disenfranchised community in Eastern North Carolina. Diabetes-related mortality in West Greenville is twice that of non-Hispanic whites in both the county and the state.
In Phase I of the, “Tell a Story, Save a Life” intervention, we collected personal diabetes-illness narratives from community members (n=27) and selected “critical” diabetes stories (n=10) through our partnership. These were subsequently critiqued, re-recorded as necessary, and disseminated in Phase II, in which community members were directed to the WGHC website where they could listen to the stories and vote for their favorite. The winning stories received cash prizes and story viewers were entered into a lottery to win one of 10 $25.00 gift cards after completing a short survey. Lessons learned include those relevant to data collection and story preparation (Phase I) and dissemination (Phase II).
Biosketch
Nancy Winterbauer, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health and is affiliated with the Center for Health Disparities at East Carolina University. She has training in medical anthropology and epidemiology, with interests in diabetes, health communication, community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community engagement. She has worked with a number of community-academic partnerships, including the West Greenville Health Council, both the North Carolina and Florida Public Health Practice-Based Research Networks, and most recently the PCORI-funded participatory research group, EC Partners, which aims to partner patients, caregivers, clinicians, and researchers in the reduction of racial disparities in health, with a current focus on diabetes.
Wake Forest
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
A learning health system (LHS) collects clinical data at the point of care, makes those data available for analysis to derive new knowledge, and applies that new knowledge to improve clinical care. Over the course of the last 15 years, teams at Indiana University and, now, Wake Forest University have worked to bring pediatric decision support to general pediatrics, diabetes care, and child neurology. An overview of this work will be presented to illustrate four observations emerging from the study of this miniature learning health system.
- Patient reported data can be immediately used to inform, tailor, and prioritize clinical care;
- Decision support is often best accomplished in a comprehensive way in which competing alerts and reminders are prioritized and selected to optimize care for each patient;
- Data collected through routine care can “feed” a clinical research enterprise; and
- Models for real-time, ongoing analysis of data offer the potential to continually refine and optimize the decision support for each patient.
The model system that will be presented is CHICA (Child Health Improvement through Compute Automation), and the session will close with an invitation to discuss where the work can go next.
Biosketch
Stephen M. Downs, MD, MS received his medical and master’s degrees in medical informatics from Stanford University. He completed his residency in Pediatrics and a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served on the faculties of pediatrics, biomedical engineering and public health.
Dr. Downs’ work is at the interface of decision sciences and medical informatics, and he has published more than 150 articles in these fields. He is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He received the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Oberst award for significant contributions to the field of clinical information technology for children and the John Eisenberg Award from the Society for Medical Decision Making for practical application of medical decision making Research. At the AAP, he is the chair of the Partnership for Policy Implementation (PPI) and the former chair of the Child Health Informatics Center Project Advisory Committee (CHIC PAC).
Duke
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The impact of the coronavirus on the health care industry and public health organizations has been significant and will continue to dominate their work for years to come. The pandemic has shone a light on the way we collect public health data and utilize it for decisions being made by governments and health organizations. This presentation will explore two modern methods for addressing these challenges by discussing the role of Health Information Exchanges (HIE) in the data collection process and the role analytics plays in supporting critical decisions during a pandemic. Several key questions for focus include:
- How are HIEs positioned to meet data collection needs for public health reporting?
- What can data tell us about the individuals and organizations impacted by the coronavirus outbreak?
- Looking at trends over time and apply advanced analytics, can we uncover new insights that will help with future preparedness efforts?
- What analytic techniques, such as optimization, forecasting and epidemiological modeling, are most useful for public health and life sciences companies to apply in this situation?
Biosketch
Eric Myers, Sr. Consultant, US Government, SAS Institute
Eric serves as the strategic consulting lead for SAS on the NC HealthConnex statewide HIE project, a public-private partnership which enables the exchange of clinical data between over 6,000 NC healthcare facilities across disparate software systems. He has devoted the last decade of his professional life to healthcare solution design and implementation with a focus on clinical data integration and outcomes. Prior to joining SAS, he managed a technical team in the acquisition, normalization, and aggregation of clinical data from independent and large healthcare organizations in NC for population health initiatives. Eric also spent 3 years with the US Peace Corps (Uganda 2008-10) focusing on healthcare and education initiatives in rural communities.
Sherrine Eid, Principal, Global Lead Epidemiology and RWE, SAS Institute
Sherrine is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist with over 20 years of experience in RWE, Epidemiology and Biostatistics. She worked in Global Health Development with Egypt, Yemen, Uganda, and other government health systems. She also served as the District Epidemiologist for the City of Alexandria, VA where she led the Epi Response Team on outbreak investigations and contact tracing. At a large health network, she co-authored outcomes research with healthcare providers. Sherrine joined a pharmaceutical company supporting Regulatory, Safety, Late Phase and Post-Marketing activities across therapeutic areas using clinical data and RWE.
UNC-CH
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
PRISMS, the Patient Reported Outcomes-Informed Symptom Management System, is a web-based personalized eHealth intervention program. PRISMS aims to help monitor and manage the potential symptom and complications in home settings for patients with newly created ostomies for cancer treatment and their family caregivers. Integrating Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) and data from digital health devices, PRISMS provides monitoring, education, and skills training. In addition, it provides the online platform moderated by wound and ostomy care nurses to facilitate social support among peer patients and caregivers. This webinar will introduce the development, usability testing, and feasibility testing of PRISMS. The usability testing has been completed and the feasibility testing of PRISMS is currently being conducted. Using mixed methods, the pilot randomized clinical trial is a 2-arm pre-post study to examine the feasibility of PRISMS and the study protocol. Afterwards, qualitative interviews will be conducted to obtain feedback from participants (N=21 patient-caregiver dyads). Based on study results, the intervention and the study protocol will be refined.
Biosketch
Lixin Song, RN, PhD, FAAN is Associate Professor and Beerstecher-Blackwell Distinguished Term Scholar at the School of Nursing and Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Song received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and completed a postdoctoral training in chronic illness management at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill School of Nursing. Dr. Song’s research crosscuts a range of areas in cancer survivorship, technology-based interventions (such as web-based and sensor-focused), cancer care transition (from diagnosis to treatment and from treatment to post-treatment self-management), symptom management, patient-reported outcomes, stress and coping, and health disparities among cancer survivors and family caregivers.
Shenmeng Xu, PhD is a research scientist at the School of Nursing, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD degree from the School of Information and Library Science, UNC-Chapel Hill. Her current work focuses on health informatics and analytics, digital health devices, and e-health literacy.
NCCU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has come to impact global populations in unprecedented ways. Daily life and the global economy will not truly return to normal until a safe and effective vaccine is readily available worldwide. This presentation will briefly discuss a couple of the most promising initial vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2. For example, the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccine candidates use mRNAs to trick cells within the body into producing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This foreign protein then elicits an immune response to produce protective antibodies against future SARS-CoV-2 infection. This presentation will also discuss the ongoing research in the Wymer laboratory to prepare a conjugate vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 as well as the development of assays to study the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to the ACE2 receptor, which is responsible for activating viral entry into the cell.
Biosketch
Nathan Wymer, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at North Carolina Central University. Prof. Wymer received his Ph.D. from Duke University and completed postdoctoral training at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Wymer then worked in the biotechnology (zuChem, Inc.) and pharmaceutical (Pfizer, Inc.) sectors developing biocatalytic synthetic routes for the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) as well as the manufacture of conjugate vaccines. Prof. Wymer’s research group is currently investigating techniques to transport drugs across the blood brain barrier, understanding how naturally-occurring mutations frequently present in racial minority groups can affect protein-receptor interactions, and improving the efficacy and safety of conjugate vaccines.
UNC-Charlotte
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease causes neural damage, including brain atrophy in the patient. Consequently, ventricles that contain cerebral fluid are expanded to filling those regions, which increases the proportional volume of ventricles in the brain. Therefore, abnormal growth of ventricle volume is an important indicator for estimating neural damage and in turn for the progression of Alzheimer’s diseases (AD). The rate of this volume-growth – i.e., neural damage, can be predicted by predictive and machine learning models using the patient’s current status. These predictions help assess the effectiveness of a particular treatment for a patient, in addition to providing some expectation of the disease timeline.
This presentation will explain the framework through which domain knowledge were used to integrate multimodal data and improve AD progression prediction performance. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is implemented to learn from an engineered representation of a structural MRI (sMRI) scan using data from the ADNI-TADPOLE challenge. A single-modal CNN using this representation outperforms the winner of the TADPOLE competition. Auxiliary information from other modalities using a fusion framework and a tree-structure CNN is also provided. Finally, it is demonstrated that the tree-structure CNN can improve performance even further in an interpretable manner, and it can be a more appropriate method compared to the conventional blind fusion approach in some applications.
Biosketch
Maryam Tavakoli is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Software Information Systems – UNC Charlotte. She has recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation, Heterogeneous Feature Integration for Regression in Multimodal Healthcare Applications, under the supervision of Dr. Ge and Dr. Hadzikadic. Her dissertation includes applications of multimodal deep learning for radiation treatment planning and Alzheimer’s disease progression prediction. Before her current position as a Research Assistant at the Health Informatics Lab, she worked on other data analytics and machine learning applications at the Institute for Social Capital and the Complex Systems Institute (2015-2018). Additionally, she gained some industrial experience in working with large-scale text data through summer internships at Rakuten-Intelligence (2018) and AOL-Verizon (2016). She received her master’s in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from Isfahan University of Technology – Iran (2014) and her bachelor in Software Engineering from University of Isfahan – Iran (2011).
ECU
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The last few years have seen trends emerging concerning real-time personal health monitoring aided by Wireless body area networks (WBANs). While the adoption of this technology by some countries has been studied, its diffusion in a worldwide context needs to be further researched to better understand opportunities and practical barriers to its global acceptance from a socio-technical perspective. This presentation will explore this topic and discuss newer academic research avenues and practitioner insights.
Biosketch
Anuradha (Ann) Rangarajan has received a Ph.D. in Technology Management, and MS degrees in Computer Systems Engineering, and Computer Science. She has over two decades of industry experience in Information Technology. Her research interests include health information technology, diffusion and acceptance of technology innovations, cybersecurity, knowledge management, and applications of data analytics in IT.
Duke
Broadcast: Seminar
Abstract
The 21st Century Cures Act allows the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to utilize real-world data (RWD) to create real-world evidence (RWE) for new indications or post approval study requirements. While the FDA considers medical claims and patient bills to be RWD, previous studies have reported endpoint ascertainment differences between physician-adjudicated and insurance claims-based methods. These results led some researchers to conclude that insurance claims-based endpoints are not sufficiently accurate to replace physician-adjudication in clinical trial endpoint ascertainment. This presentation will present results from a study that compared physician-adjudication with two insurance claims data sources to understand how endpoint accuracy differences impact RWE results.
Biosketch
Dr. Eisenstein’s primary research interest is the use of information technologies to simplify clinical trial operations and reduce research costs. This has included the evaluation of four population-based studies that used asynchronous decision support to improve care coordination for Medicaid patients. He is also involved with several efforts to evaluate the feasibility of eSource (direct data capture from site electronic health records to clinical trial databases). Currently, he is Data Coordinating Center Co-PI for the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute sponsored TRANSFORM-HF clinical trial. This 6000 patient heart failure pragmatic trial is using novel information technology strategies to simplify clinical trial design, improve operations and reduce costs.