William Tierney, MD  Dr. Tierney is President and CEO of Regenstrief Institute, Inc and Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Medicine of the Indiana University School of Medicine, and currently is Interim Director for the Regenstrief Center of Biomedical Informatics.  Dr. Tierney has studied the effects of innovative, computer-based interventions to improve health care quality and lower costs. He is also Director of Research for the Indiana University Kenya Program where he is responsible for a major HIV/AIDS research program in collaboration with Moi University. This research collaboration currently includes 15 U.S. universities collaborating with universities and other institutions in East Africa. He is the leader of the team of Americans and Kenyans that created and implemented the first ambulatory electronic medical record system in sub-Saharan Africa that now contains more than 800,000 visit records supporting 29 urban and rural primary care and HIV clinics in Kenya. Dr. Tierney is leading the team implementing this open-source medical record system (OpenMRS) in HIV/AIDS clinics in Tanzania and Uganda. OpenMRS has also been implemented in more than a dozen other countries on three continents.

Dr. Tierney was the Founding Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's National Resource Center for Practice-Based Research Networks (PBRNs). In addition to the research network he has established in the above-mentioned HIV/AIDS clinics in Kenya, Dr. Tierney also directs ResNet, a PBRN within IU Medical Group-Primary Care's 27 inner-city and suburban primary care practice sites, with more than 250 physicians and 150,000 adult and pediatric patients who make more than 400,000 visits per year to IUMG-PC sites.

In addition to informatics-based health services research, he has also performed dozens of epidemiologic studies utilizing the clinical data stored in the clinical data repositories created by Indiana University in Indianapolis and Kenya.

Michael Barnes, MD Dr. Barnes is an associate professor of family medicine, IU School of Medicine; and Regenstrief Research Scientist.  Dr. Barnes developed the STAR medical record system at the University of Missouri. The STAR system was the third EMR that Dr. Barnes designed and implemented.  He also completely re-worked the look and feel, navigation and some of the content of the Web-based RMRS in addition to adding a number of features.  He is an expert in JAVA, object-oriented programming, relational databases and human interface design.  He has 33 years of experience with computer systems development. 

Dr. Barnes has developed the DOCS4DOCS program that delivers reports from the all of the hospital systems within INPC to more than 800 practices and 3200 physicians – representing more than 85% of active central Indiana practitioners.  He is interested in improving the physician’s diagnostic and treatment skills through the use of computers.  Dr. Barnes will provide the lectures to the fellows on JAVA, software engineering and system design.

Paul Biondich, MD, MS Dr. Biondich is an associate professor of pediatrics, IU School of Medicine; and Regenstrief Research Scientist.  Dr. Biondich is a medical informatics researcher whose research interests include decision support systems and controlled medical vocabularies.  As a practicing pediatrician, he has significant experience in the design, implementation and installation of multiple decision support systems, particularly within outpatient settings.  Dr. Biondich is the co-creator of the Child Health Improvement through Computer Automation (CHICA) system, which is designed to improve the process of outpatient pediatric preventive care.  He is active nationally in pediatric vocabulary and guideline developmental efforts.  Much of this work with the American Academy of Pediatrics involves the disambiguation and active revision of pre-existing clinical guidelines, along with the ultimate development of supporting standardized vocabularies.  He also has extensive experience with clinical repository development, having co-developed the AMRS, an open source repository designed to support HIV care in sub-Saharan Africa.

He interacts regularly with medical informatics fellows through a series of lectures on various topics involving enterprise database modeling, HIT standards development and decision support systems.  He provides mentorship to all of the fellows on these various topics and assists with manuscript creation and grant writing/study design issues.  He has co-author several peer reviewed informatics articles written by fellows.

Paul Dexter, MD  Dr. Dexter is an associate professor of clinical medicine, IU School of Medicine, Chief Medical Information Officer and Director of Clinical Applications, Wishard Hospital; and Regenstrief Research Scientist. Dr. Dexter is an officer at the closely affiliated Wishard Hospital (site of the majority of Regenstrief Informatics trials); and research scientist, Regenstrief Institute.  Dr. Dexter has implemented several large randomized trials of computer reminders and computer “standing orders" related to preventive care and advance directives.  He subsequently published the results of these trials as first author in articles appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Annals of Internal Medicine.  Finally, he is the direct supervisor over the programmers responsible for the production of Regenstrief systems, the RMRS and Gopher order entry.  Given his research background, leadership role at Wishard Hospital and management of the programmers, he has been able to facilitate many of the informatics-related fellows' projects.

Brian Dixon, PhD  Dr. Dixon is an Assistant Professor of Health Informatics in the Indiana University School of Informatics, is a Research Scientist with the Regenstrief Center for Biomedical Informatics and the IU Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, and is an Investigator in Residence, VA Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice.  He has served as the principal project manager for the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) contract with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC). In this capacity he served as the chair of the Specifications Factory workgroup refining and expanding the Health Information Event Messaging (HIEM) specification and associated profiles.  In addition, he designed the protocol for and facilitated telephone-based, structured interviews with a sample population of health information management (HIM) directors to determine the adoption and use of personal health records (PHRs) in Central Indiana. He also served as project manager on Indiana University’s Syndromic Surveillance and Situational Awareness contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  In his CDC role, Mr. Dixon oversaw the development, testing, and demonstration of NHIN-based transactions to support Biosurveillance and other public health use cases.  This included demonstrations at the 2008 NHIN Forum in Washington, DC, Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2009 Interoperability Showcase in Chicago, IL, and the Public Health Information Network (PHIN) 2009 Interoperability Showcase in Atlanta, GA.

Stephen Downs, MD  Dr. Downs is co-director of the NLM-funded Medical Informatics Fellowship Program  Dr. Downs is the director of general pediatrics and the Children’s Health Services Research Program at the Indiana University School of Medicine, associate director for decision sciences at the Regenstrief Institute, and Former Director of the Duke-UNC NLM Medical Informatics Training Program.  His research interests include computer-based decision support systems for primary care, expected utility theory, decision analysis and cost-effectiveness analysis and their application to guideline development and computer based decision support.  He teaches most of the decisions sciences component of the fellowship program.  Dr. Downs has served as a primary mentor for Paul Biondich, providing laboratory facilities and programmers for his project.  The result was two joint publications during Dr. Biondich's fellowship and several since.  He also teaches in the didactic portion of the curriculum and has been a secondary mentor to many of the fellows.

Jon Duke, MD, MS  Dr. Duke is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. He is an assistant professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine and currently serves as director of Regenstrief Institute’s Drug Safety Informatics Lab and as the Institute’s Chief Innovation Officer.

Dr. Duke completed a National Library of Medicine Fellowship in Medical Informatics at Regenstrief and joined the faculty in July 2010. His primary research focus is on decision support in medication safety, with a particular emphasis on evaluation of adverse drug events and drug-drug interactions in complex multi-drug regimens. His other area of research is EHR usability, and he is leading user interface development for Regenstrief's new CPOE platform known as G3. Dr. Duke is fluent in Japanese and has done work with the medical informatics community in Japan. He continues to see patients as a practicing internist.

John T. (JT) Finnell, MD, MSc  Dr. Finnell is associate professor of emergency medicine, and director, informatics division, IU School of Medicine at Indiana University, and research scientist at Regenstrief Institute.  He is site principal investigator of an NLM-funded grant with Dr. James Cimino of Columbia University, entitled “Infobuttons to Improve Information Access in Order Entry.” This research explores ways that health information can be used to improve the use of clinician order entry systems. 

Dr. Finnell joined the Institute in 2002 as an NLM-funded medical informatics fellow.  During his fellowship, Dr. Finnell earned a master’s degree in the NIH-funded CITE program.  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 15, 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.

Roland Gamache, PhD, MBA is a Research Scientist at Regenstrief Institute and Assistant Research Professor, Divison of General Internal Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine.  Dr. Gamache previously held the position of director of the State Health Data Center with the Indiana State Department of Health.  Roland has a history of successful public health informatics collaborations with Indiana University and Regenstrief Institute, and has worked with hospitals and the Indiana Hospital Association on the use of Public Health Surveillance Systems for hospitals emergency departments.

Shaun Grannis, MD  Dr. Grannis is an associate professor of family medicine, IU School of Medicine; and Regenstrief Research Scientist. 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.  Dr. Grannis developed a patient record linkage algorithm using cryptographically de-identified demographic data for use in distributed clinical data networks. The goal of the linkage algorithm is to maintain patient confidentiality while providing researchers with access to clinically meaningful data.  He further extended and characterized this linkage methodology using robust probabilistic techniques. 

Dr. Grannis is also actively involved in bio-terrorism detection and syndromic surveillance.  He is currently involved in multi-year studies that explore multiple facets of disease detection and syndromic surveillance challenges, including geographical de-identification, understanding temporal-spatial disease trends and establishing syndromic surveillance data standards.  He is technical lead in a four-year project integrating data flows from over 110 hospitals in the state of Indiana for use in disease surveillance and clinical research.  Dr. Grannis contributes lectures to the fellowship curriculum and provides key guidance to fellows’ research projects.

Burke Mamlin, MD Dr. Mamlin is Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine, IU School of Medicine; and Regenstrief Research Scientist.  Dr. Mamlin is a software engineering expert and a practicing internist for Indiana University School of Medicine.  His research interests include computerized-physician order entry (CPOE) systems and electronic medical record development for developing countries. He is the primary author of the AMRS software.

Dr. Mamlin was chief medical resident at Indiana University School of Medicine prior to starting his NLM-funded medical informatics fellowship in June 2000.  During his fellowship, Dr. Mamlin developed a Java-based physician order entry and note writing tool to replace the DOS-based but very successful Medical Gopher order entry tool in the third generation Regenstrief Medical Records System. He presented his findings as a poster at an AMIA meeting at the beginning of the second year of his fellowship. Other work during his fellowship included a study of a natural language processing system for automated coding of findings within chest X-ray reports. He presented these findings at AMIA 2003, along with a poster for an XML-annotation toolkit he developed in the process. During his fellowship, Dr. Mamlin collaborated with fellows from other disciplines in a study of clinical characteristics associated with early renal insufficiency in HIV patients. In another study, he worked with past and current fellows to show the efficacy of text scrubbing tool for removing all patient and person identifiers from pathology reports and to highlight voice interpretation processing errors.

Douglas K. Martin, MD is Research Scientist at Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Professor of Clinical Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Martin specializes in component based application architectures, clinical data modeling, clinical vocabularies, clinical repository architecture, system integration, healthcare data standards, and clinical decision support systems. He is the principal architect of VueCentric, a component-based, open-architecture infrastructure that permits the dynamic construction of highly configurable clinical desktop applications using a best-of-breed approach.

Susanne Ragg, MD,  is a Research Scientist at Regenstrief Institute and Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine.  Dr. Ragg has been playing an important role in the Medical Informatics Section for a number of years. She has played a key role in supporting RI Medical Informatics work in biospecimen management, and has proven herself a valuable member of the team and brings experience and knowledge that complements others.  In addition to her service as an attending pediatric hematology/oncology physician, she maintains an active research program.  Dr. Ragg makes significant contributions to the development of essential software tools such as the caTissue suite and related tools such as caTrack.  

Marc Rosenman, MD  Dr. Rosenman is Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Indiana University School of Medicine. He completed a combined informatics and health services research fellowship at the Institute. His research interests involve clinical epidemiologic studies using the Regenstrief Medical Records System (RMRS) and other large databases (such as Medicaid claims). As director of the Health Data and Epidemiology Section at Regenstrief, he helps supervise eight data analysts and helps advise fellows who are extracting data from the RMRS. He also coordinates RMRS research by other Indiana and Purdue University faculty and has been a research mentor for medical students and residents.

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.

Daniel Vreeman, PT, DPT  Dr. Vreeman is Assistant Research Professor at the IU School of Medicine and Regenstrief Research Scientist.  Dr. Vreeman is a past Regenstrief Medical Informatics Fellow.  His primary research interests are the use of standardized clinical vocabularies including LOINC to support electronic health information exchange for clinical practice and research.  Dr. Vreeman is co-director of the LOINC development efforts at Regenstrief. Dr. Vreeman teaches in the didactic portion of the fellowship curriculum and is available to serve as a mentor to fellows interested in issues related to controlled terminologies.

Vivienne Zhu, MD  Dr. Zhu is an assistant research professor in the Department of Knowledge Informatics Translation, Indiana University School of Medicine and a Regenstrief Research Scientist. Dr. Zhu has a strong medical informatics background, especially in clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and health outcomes research. She has sucessfully developed and evaluated CDSS for parental smoking cessation, childhood immunization forestcasting, and medication adherence assessement for diabetic patients. She also developed an ehanced patient matching algorithm for an operational health information exchange.