Regenstrief Institute, Inc.

Greg Arling, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Arling’s research interests are in health care quality assessment, evaluation, and policy analysis. He has considerable experience with statistical analysis of large data sets, with a recent interest in multilevel modeling. Much of his research has been conducted with elderly populations in long-term care settings. He has helped develop comprehensive measures of quality of care and quality of life which have been applied to long-term care public report cards and pay-for-performance systems. He also has studied transitions between care settings, such as hospital, nursing home, or community care. He seeks to understand risk factors associated with health care costs and quality, and to develop better risk adjustment and statistical estimation techniques.

Matthew J. Bair, MD, MS

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Bair’s research focuses on understanding the interface between affective disorders (e.g. depression and anxiety) and chronic pain and developing strategies to improve pain management in the primary care setting. Dr. Bair’s major educational foci are teaching implementation research methods and evidence-based medicine to medical residents, fellows, and IUPUI junior faculty.

Michael R. Barnes, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Clinical Family Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Barnes is the primary developer of the DOCS4DOCS clinical document distribution system which serves all the major Indianapolis hospitals. His interests include improving the physician's diagnostic and treatment skills through the use of computers. He is also involved in object oriented design and programming process management.

Paul Biondich, MD, MS

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Biondich’s research interests include clinical decision support systems and the use of large scale, consolidated electronic health information infrastructures in this regard. He serves on national committees in pediatric medical terminology development for HL7, LOINC, and SNOMED, and is co-developer of a next generation medical record system for HIV care in Eldoret, Kenya.

Malaz Boustani, MD, MPH

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Boustani is interested in enhancing the quality of the current health care system to accommodate the needs of patients with cognitive impairment in general and those with dementia in particular. He is working on the development of a multifaceted dementia care system across various health care settings including ambulatory, primary and secondary care, hospital environment, and long-term care facilities. He is involved in various large projects aimed at identifying the barriers to development of an enhanced system in primary care (PREVENT, PRIMS-PC, and I-NEEDS studies), the hospital (e-CHAMP, 3Ds, and POCD projects), and in long-term care (ALFA and Dementia Care studies).

Dawn Bravata, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research & Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Clinical Coordinator, VA HSR&D Stroke Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI)

Dr. Bravata conducts health services research in cerebrovascular disease. The fundamental goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for stroke patients and others with cerebrovascular disease. She is interested in three topics within this larger domain: the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions for patients with acute ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA), the quality of care received by patients with stroke and TIA, and the identification and treatment of medical co-morbidities in patients with cerebrovascular disease.

Christopher M. Callahan, MD

Director of Aging Research and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Cornelius and Yvonne Pettinga Professor in Aging Research, Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Director, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Callahan’s research seeks to improve the outcomes of care for older adults with late life depression and dementia. His work explores innovative models of care that support the generalist physician in their day-to-day provision of health care for older adults. These new models of care focus on collaboration between health care providers, patients, and family as well as across the continuum of care with an emphasis on the application of information technology.

Daniel Owen Clark, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Clark’s interests are in the design, evaluation, and translation of primary care-based interventions to support physical activity and self-management of chronic disease. Dr. Clark is co-director of the IU-Roybal Center for Translational Research on Chronic Disease Self-Management Among Vulnerable Older Adults.

Teresa Damush, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Assistant Research Professor in Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research; Affiliated Scientist, Center for Enhancing Quality of Life in Chronic Illness, Indiana University School of Nursing; Associate Member, Cancer Prevention and Control Program, Indiana University Cancer Center

Dr. Damush is a social psychologist specializing in health psychology. As the Implementation Research Coordinator for the Stroke QUERI Center, Dr. Damush's research focuses on implementing evidence-based practices for stroke survivors and caregivers. She collaborates with colleagues on designing and evaluating system interventions in the delivery of evidence-based practices. She has funding from of the Department of Veterans Affairs to adapt existing evidence-based tools for secondary stroke prevention from hospital discharge to the veterans' homes. In addition, Dr. Damush continues to design and evaluate disease self-management programs for chronic medical conditions including musculoskeletal pain and stroke.

Paul Dexter, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Dexter is Chief Medical Information Officer for Wishard Health Services and supervisor of the programmers responsible for the Regenstrief Medical Record System and the Gopher Order Entry System. He has conducted multiple trials related to computerized clinical reminder systems. His interest is in the development and evaluation of computer technologies and their effects on physician responses.

Brad Doebbeling, MD, MSc, FACP

Director of Health Services Research and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Director, Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Department of Medicine Professor of Health Services Research and Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Director, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Doebbeling, a nationally recognized health care epidemiologist, health services researcher, and mentor, directs the Institute’s Health Services Research Program. His center is working to improve healthcare through discovery, evaluation, implementation, and sustained adoption of evidence-based clinical and management practices. Dr. Doebbeling's research focuses on identifying environmental, organizational, provider and patient factors influencing the effectiveness of systems interventions, such as implementing decision support, to improve healthcare. His methodologic work has defined new approaches to benchmark performance and identify determinants of program effectiveness. His research is interdisciplinary and cross-cutting in the areas of the prevention and management of antimicrobial resistance and patient safety, mental health, cancer and other chronic conditions. Dr. Doebbeling also serves as Associate Director for the NIH K30 Clinical Investigator Training Enhancement (CITE) Program.

Caroline Doebbeling, MD, MSc

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Internal Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Director, Complete Life Program, Indiana University Cancer Center

Dr. Carney Doebbeling’s research interests include the epidemiology of medical and psychiatric co-morbidity, the evaluation of medical services delivery to persons with mental disorders, and the delivery of mental health services to persons with medical conditions, including cancer and diabetes. A funded researcher, she is actively involved in evaluating mental health services and policy developed at the insurer level, including both private insurance and Medicaid. Dr. Carney Doebbeling has served as President of the Association of Medicine and Psychiatry. She serves on the editorial boards of General Hospital Psychiatry and the Primary Care Companion, and directs the Mental Disorders in Medicine Interest Group for the Society of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Carney Doebbeling is Director of Complete Life, an Indiana University Cancer Center program providing mental health, social work, artistic, nutritional, and music services.

John T. Finnell, MD, MSc

Phone: 317-423-5512

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Indiana University

Dr. Finnell is a graduate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine and board certified in Emergency Medicine. He is interested in the application of medical informatics to the practice of Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Finnell joined the Institute in 2002 where his research activities focused on building the infrastructure necessary to capture emergency department visit data. The departmental tracking system known as "WizErD" began capturing visit data on July 15th, 2003.

His first publication entitled "Community Clinical Data Exchange for Emergency Medicine Patients" explored the pattern of emergency healthcare delivery across Indianapolis over a one year period. They found that one-fourth of the emergency department patients with more than one visit also visited one of the other five hospital systems. These patients could potentially benefit the most from a shared clinical data network.

Currently Dr. Finnell is working on standardizing emergency department data in order to implement treatment guidelines established by ACEP, the American College of Emergency Physicians, which are initiated by the patient's chief complaint and triage data. He plans to augment the standard order set with "suggested" orders defined by these guidelines, and customized to the patient through their electronic medical record.

Richard M. Frankel, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Senior Research Sociologist, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Frankel’s research interests include relationship-centered care and its effect on health care processes and outcomes, biopsychosocial medicine, communication between older adults and their providers, the effects of exam room computers on the physician-patient relationship, communication about medical errors, and conversations at the end of life. Dr. Frankel’s educational interests include teaching and evaluating professionalism, theory and design of communication skills programs, faculty development with specific emphases on new faculty and teaching humanism at the bedside, and implementation and evaluation of experiential and other interactive learning formats that incorporate personal awareness and mindfulness.

Shaun Grannis, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Grannis’s research interests include developing, implementing and studying technology to overcome the challenges of integrating data from distributed systems for use in health care delivery and research. His patient matching research has received recognition from the American Medical Informatics Association for outstanding contribution to the body of medical informatics knowledge.. He serves as technical co-chair for the national Health Information Technology Standards Panel’s biosurveillance workgroup to develop standards for population health information exchange. He is involved in multi-year studies that explore multiple facets of disease detection and public health surveillance challenges, including geographical de-identification, understanding temporal-spatial disease trends, and developing regional clinical reminders. He is leading a 4-year project integrating data flows from over 110 hospitals in the state of Indiana for use in disease surveillance and clinical research. He has worked with Indiana, Michigan, Texas, and other states to develop statewide data sharing initiatives. Dr. Grannis also maintains a clinical practice.

David Haggstrom, MD, MAS

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research & Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Associate Member, Indiana University Cancer Center

Dr. Haggstrom is a cancer health services researcher who is broadly interested in the measurement and improvement of the quality of health care delivery across the cancer continuum. He is using large secondary databases, including VA national data and SEER-Medicare, to assess the quality of cancer care. His research interests include implementation research, the measurement of health care organizational characteristics, and evaluation of quality improvement interventions, including the collaborative and chronic care models. Dr. Haggstrom is actively studying the influence of organizational characteristics and provider specialty upon colorectal cancer screening and the quality of survivorship care among colorectal cancer survivors. His research interests also include personal health records, patient-physician communication, and risk perception.

Lisa E. Harris, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Dean for Wishard Affairs, John F. Williams, Jr., M.D. Scholar and Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; CEO and Medical Director, Wishard Health Services

Dr. Harris’ research interests include using the patient’s perspective in evaluating and improving quality of medical care in both the inpatient and outpatient settings.

Hugh C. Hendrie, MB, ChB, DSc

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Professor of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Hendrie is co-principal investigator of a multi-disciplinary group of researchers conducting international comparative studies of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in Nigeria and the United States supported by the National Institute on Aging. He is a member of the steering committee of the National Institute of Aging supported Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center. He also chaired a National Institutes of Health committee on factors influencing cognitive and emotional health and is on the steering committee of the Center for Disease Control Alzheimer Association Healthy Brain Initiative. Dr. Hendrie collaborates on intervention trials for the treatment of depression and dementia in primary care, and is conducting surveys of retired physicians and their spouses focusing on predictors of life satisfaction.

Siu L. Hui, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Director of Biostatistics, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Hui, the senior biostatistician at the Institute, collaborates with other Institute scientists and conducts her own research. Her major projects involve issues with aging, including osteoporosis, menopause, dementia and cardiovascular disease. Her research interest is in the development of statistical methods and the application of innovative techniques to address biomedical and health services research questions. Statistical areas include missing and longitudinal data, statistical modeling, and measurement errors.

Tom Imperiale, MD

Phone: (317) 630-7760

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Staff Physician, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Imperiale’s primary research interests include tailoring screening for colorectal cancer based on individual patient risk, and using quantitative research methods in studying prevention of the complications of cirrhosis. Secondary research interests include prognosis and management of acute upper gastrointestinal hemorrhage, and assessment of new technologies to the application of digestive diseases.

Thomas Inui, MD

President and CEO of Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Sam Regenstrief Professor of Health Services Research; Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Health Care Research, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Inui’s research interests focus on physician-patient communication, effectiveness of primary care services, improving the health status of vulnerable populations, and measuring outcomes of medical care. Dr. Inui is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

A Flag in the Wind: Educating for Professionalism in Medicine, AAMC, February 2003

Examining How Medicine is Taught: Reading and Changing the Culture

Successful Medical Outcomes? It’s the Relationship that Counts

Erin Krebs, MD, MPH

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Krebs is a general internist with a research focus on chronic pain management in primary care. Her main research objectives are to improve the effectiveness and safety of prescribing practices for chronic pain, and to implement practical and cost-effective biopsychosocial pain management methods in primary care settings. Dr. Krebs’s related research interests include outcomes measurement, patient-provider communication, women’s health, mental health, and substance abuse.

Kurt Kroenke, MD

Phone: (317) 630-7447

Director of Fellowship and Training Programs and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Kroenke focuses his clinical research on the optimal evaluation and management of common symptoms such as pain, fatigue, dizziness, and other physical complaints. He also conducts research on depression, anxiety and other mental disorders in primary care. His methodologic expertise includes clinical trials, questionnaire development, clinical epidemiology, and health services research. He is the Director of the Indiana University Clinical Investigator Training Enhancement (CITE) Program which provides a campus-wide Masters of Science in Clinical Research degree for fellows and junior faculty from numerous disciplines.

Eri Kuno, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Research Scientist, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Assistant Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University School of Engineering and Technology, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis

Dr. Kuno has been involved in research projects that use routine management information systems to examine the delivery of psychiatric services within the public sector. Current interests include an application of simulation modeling technologies to services system planning and addressing system level issues in implementing evidence-based practices.

Burke Mamlin, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Mamlin has been involved in the design and development of computer applications for medicine at Regenstrief Institute for over two decades with a focus on physician order entry. He helped create the Medical Gopher Order Entry system and has led the development of a next generation of this system. He has extensive programming experience and continues to practice medicine as a general internist while mentoring informatics fellows. Dr. Mamlin is applying his experience at Regenstrief to the design and development of an electronic medical record system for developing counties ( www.OpenMRS.org ). Open MRS is used in the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa as part of Indiana University’s Kenya Program.

J. Michael (Mike) McCoy, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Visiting Professor of Clinical Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. McCoy is a nationally recognized expert in hospital and medical school information systems. His experience includes serving as Chief Information Officer, UCLA Healthcare; Associate Dean for Information Technology, UCLA School of Medicine; Senior Natural Scientist, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California and CIO, Bumrungrad International Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand. Dr. McCoy guides the overall architecture of the Regenstrief Medical Record System (RMRS) and all of its components to create a coherent, componentized, scaleable model that will serve as the foundation for the next generation of the Regenstrief Institute's informatics research and development efforts. He explores new technologies to understand their potential value and helps establish innovative development procedures.

Doug Miller, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Richard M. Fairbanks Professor in Aging Research and Associate Director, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Miller's interests include the causes, prevention, and remediation of frailty and decline of self-care functioning in late, middle aged and older persons, especially in socially vulnerable urban African-Americans. Dr. Miller is also interested in improving the care of older patients visiting emergency departments and the cardiovascular health of urban populations through secondary prevention efforts.

Wendy Morrison, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Assistant Professor of Economics, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Dr. Morrison is an economist specializing in health economics and experimental economics. Her research examines the costs and benefits of interventions and the incentives and barriers faced by patients, providers, insurers, and private industry. Knowledge of these benefits, incentives and barriers can be used to improve healthcare by directing healthcare dollars to those treatments and services producing the most health gain.

J. Marc Overhage, MD, PhD

Director of Medical Informatics and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Regenstrief Professor of Medical Informatics, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Overhage's research has focused on the use of informational interventions to modify provider behavior including computerized provider order entry, clinical decision support systems and other forms of feedback. These systems require clinical data to drive them and have led him to begin developing approaches to health information exchange. In order to facilitate this work, he has engaged in developing clinical information standards, advising the federal government on policy- guiding health information technology and developing sustainable models for providing health information services. Dr. Overhage serves as President and CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), a not-for-profit corporation created to sustain health information exchange.

Marc B. Rosenman, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine

Dr. Rosenman's research focuses on clinical epidemiology, electronic medical records systems, and health information from multiple sources. Dr. Rosenman serves as faculty supervisor for the Institute's data management group.

Jason J. Saleem, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Research Scientist and VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Assistant Research Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Dr. Saleem received his Ph.D. from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2003, specializing in human factors engineering. During his graduate training and post-graduate experience, he has been involved in the study and design of systems in complex domains including industry, aviation, and healthcare, and has contributed original human factors investigations to the literature in these areas. Dr. Saleem’s current research involves application of human factors engineering to enhance clinical information systems, including electronic decision support, as well as redesign of healthcare processes for improved safety.

Michelle Salyers, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Director for Research Operations, VA Health Services Research and Development Center on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center; Co-Director for the ACT Center of Indiana; Associate Research Professor, Department of Psychology, Indiana University-Purdue University

Dr. Salyers is a mental health services researcher with interests in psychiatric rehabilitation, primarily focusing on implementation of assertive community treatment and illness self-management programs for adults with severe mental illnesses.

Gunther Schadow, MD, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Informatics, Indiana University School of Informatics

Dr. Schadow has been a leader in healthcare information standards since 1999. He was instrumental in designing the HL7 version 3.0 Reference Information Model (RIM), the Unified Code for Units of Measure (UCUM), and the Structured Product Labeling (SPL) standard for the encoding of pharmaceutical and clinical knowledge of drug products. SPL is now mandated by the U.S. FDA and has been implemented by all of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. He is designing an electronic prescription data management and order entry system based on a comprehensive implementation of the HL7 version 3 standards, including SPL. Dr. Schadow is also leading the technical implementation of a comprehensive tissue banking system for multiple tissue collections across the Indiana University campus. Dr. Schadow has a long-term interest in natural language processing and has developed a program that extracts and codes specimens and diagnoses from surgical pathology text reports. He has worked on designing the next generation Regenstrief Medical Record System and has extensive experience in design and implementation of secure Internet communication using SSL and IPsec.

Linas Simonaitis, MD

Dr. Simonaitis started his Medical Informatics fellowship in July 2004. He is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, and has worked as a Hospitalist and as a Primary Care physician prior to coming to Regenstrief.

Dr. Simonaitis is very interested in the Electronic Health Record, and in using Clinical Guidelines to provide Decision Support at the point of care. He is also interested in exploring Natural Language Processing, the ability of a computer to read through pages of free text and produce a succinct summary.

During his first year of the Informatics Fellowship, Dr. Simonaitis has been studying the use of XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting Objects), a W3C Consortium Standard. He created XSLT stylesheets, and used them with an XSL-FO Formatting Engine to transform XML patient data into PDF clinical reports. He helped to implement this process at Wishard Memorial Hospital. Subsequently, he studied usage statistics and administered a survey instrument to assess clinical-user acceptance of the new process.

More recently, he has been studying national drug codes and classification systems. He is planning a project to improve the indexing of medicines within the Regenstrief Medical Record System. The backbone of the new indexing system is expected to be the RxNorm codes developed by the National Library of Medicine.

William Tierney, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Director of the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Improvement and Research; Director of Research, Indiana University-Kenya Program; Indiana University Site Director for the National Health Information Technology Resource Center, AHRQ Resource Center for Practice-Based Research Networks

Dr. Tierney uses electronic medical records and information gathered from patients, applied at critical points in the interactions of patients and health care providers, to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care. He performs epidemiologic studies utilizing the clinical data stored in the clinical data repositories created by Indiana University in Indianapolis and Kenya. Dr. Tierney teaches on health services research methods, and writes and publishes medical literature. He is committed to using information technology to enhance relevant clinical research by directing the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Improvement and Research, directing the academic primary care practice-based research network in Indianapolis (ResNet), and directing a network of HIV clinics in rural health centers in Kenya. Dr. Tierney is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Alexia M. Torke, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research; Associate Director, Fairbanks Fellowship in Medical Ethics

Dr. Torke is interested in the ethical communication aspects of medical decision making. She has conducted research on patients’ preferences for end-of-life care and currently focuses on the topic of surrogate decision making – the making of major medical decisions for patients with dementia, delirium or other conditions that impair cognitive function. She has designed and evaluated end-of-life care curricula and clinical ethics for medical students and residents.

Wanzhu Tu, PhD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana; Associate Professor of Medicine, Department of Medicine, Division of Biostatistics, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research

Dr. Tu’s primary research interest is the development of new analytical methods for clinical and epidemiological studies. His current research activities involve the modeling of infectious diseases, and the analysis of health service outcome data.

Daniel J. Vreeman, PT, DPT, MSc

Phone: 317-423-5515

Assistant Research Professor, Indiana University School of Medicine; Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute

Dr. Vreeman's research interests are centered on understanding and promoting effective organization, analysis, management, and use of information in healthcare. The principle focus areas are: (1) The use of standardized clinical vocabularies to support electronic health information exchange, and (2) Investigation of medical informatics applications to improve healthcare delivery and research. Dr. Vreeman also has a primary role in the development of the LOINC database of universal codes for clinical observations.

More information on Dr. Vreeman's research and professional interests can be found at: http://dr.danielvreeman.net

Michael Weiner, MD, MPH

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.; Associate Professor of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine; Center Scientist, Indiana University Center for Aging Research; Director, IU Gero-informatics

Dr. Weiner's clinical, health-services, and informatics research focuses on measuring and improving the quality, coordination, organization, and delivery of health services for older adults. He studies the effects of health information and information technology on physicians' practices and patients' outcomes. He has worked extensively with electronic medical records, administrative data, and informatics applications, to advance the study and use of information systems in caring for the aging population. An active internist, he also teaches medical trainees and provides primary medical care for older residents of Marion County, Indiana.

Linda Williams, MD

Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; Associate Professor of Neurology, Indiana University School of Medicine; Senior Investigator, VA Health Services Research and Development Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice and Chief of Neurology, Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Dr. Williams' research focuses on improving the health-related quality of life of patients with stroke. Her primary research interests are developing quality of life measurement methods, evaluating the relationship between post-stroke depression and quality of life, and in using quality of life assessment at the point of care to improve stroke outcomes and process of care. Dr. Williams' is the Clinical Coordinator and co-PI of the VA Stroke Quality Enhancement Research Initiative (QUERI)--a VA research team whose mission is reducing stroke risk and maximizing the functional status and quality of life of veterans with stroke by systematically implementing clinical research findings and evidence-based guidelines into routine clinical practice. The three research foci of the QUERI are access to rehabilitation after stroke, management of atrial fibrillation to reduce stroke risk, and detection and treatment of post-stroke depression.