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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Abstract:
Dr. Hripcsak will discuss the national push for electronic health records that will make an unprecedented amount of clinical information available for research, with approximately one billion patient visits documented per year in the US. These data may lead to discoveries that improve understanding of biology, aid the diagnosis and treatment of disease, and permit the inclusion of diverse populations and rare diseases. Health record data also bring challenges, with missing and inaccurate data and substantial bias. Some of the bias comes about because the data are generated as part of the health care process. For example blood tests done at night select for patients who are sicker. We employ nonlinear time series methods borrowed from other fields to address the challenges, and we attempt to model and correct for biases due to the health care process. We incorporate mechanistic models to constrain the search space to create accurate predictions despite limited training sets and missing values.
Bio:
George Hripcsak, MD, MS, is Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor and Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics and Director of Medical Informatics Services for NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Campus. He is a board-certified internist with degrees in chemistry, medicine, and biostatistics. Dr. Hripcsak’s current research focus is on the clinical information stored in electronic health records and on the development of next-generation health record systems. Using nonlinear time series analysis, machine learning, knowledge engineering, and natural language processing, he is developing the methods necessary to support clinical research and patient safety initiatives. He leads the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) coordinating center, an international network with 160 researchers and 600 million patient records. He co-chaired the Meaningful Use Workgroup of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology that defines the criteria by which health care providers collect incentives for using electronic health records. He led the effort to create the Arden Syntax, a language for representing health knowledge that has become a national standard. Dr. Hripcsak is a fellow of the National Academy of Medicine, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the New York Academy of Medicine, and he chaired the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee. He has published over 250 papers.