Sep. 11, 2019

The Role of Informatics in the Implementation of Population Precision Health

Abstract: Precision health is an emerging concept in healthcare. Coupled with the movement towards Learning Healthcare Systems, there is an opportunity to transform how care and prevention are imagined. To realize this vision requires collection and analysis of large amounts of disparate data, development of knowledge from the data, and seamless ways to deliver the knowledge back to clinicians and, increasingly, patients. Informatics is expected to play a key role in precision health. In this presentation, Dr. Williams will provide some background and philosophy on different terms in current use, will introduce Geisinger’s MyCode Community Health Initiative—the largest implemented population…

April 3, 2019

Climate-driven urban heat and its adaptation at a large scale

Abstract Among many globally recognized environmental problems such as water scarcity, air pollution, and energy security, heat stress is one of the most severe climate-driven threats to the human society. The situation is further exacerbated in urban areas by urban heat islands (UHIs). Absent measures to ameliorate them, the problems associated with heat stress are expected to intensify due to rapid urban development coupled with climate change. One significant barrier to heat mitigation through urban engineering is the lack of quantitative attribution of the various surface processes toUHI intensity. In this seminar, the intrinsic mechanism of UHI and its quantitative…

March 20, 2019

What Can We Learn from a Hundred Thousand E. coli Genomes?

Feb. 27, 2019

Information Retrieval from the Electronic Health Records for Patient Cohort Discovery

The widespread adoption of electronic health records has made patient data for re-use. One use case for such re-use is the ability to identify patient cohorts for recruitment into clinical research studies. This talk will describe the use of information retrieval techniques and their evaluation for patient cohort discovery as well as challenges to research involving patient data. William Hersh, MD, FACMI, FAMIA, FACP is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. Dr. Hersh is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics…

Feb. 5, 2019

Health 3.0: Enabling precision medicine through translational bioinformatics and the learning health system

A confluence of technological, computational and legislative advances have put us on the horizon of an exciting time in biomedical research and healthcare, with increasingly blurred boundaries between the two. Advances in experimental technologies enable observation across tens of thousands of molecules at a time. Pervasive mobile devices and an ever-expanding landscape of activity and health-related apps are generating terabytes of data outside of traditional clinical care providers. Advances in computational power and parallel computing facilitate the analysis and interpretation of these diverse streams of data. And an evolving legislative landscape has led to the rapid uptake of electronic health…