Regenstrief Institute, Inc. Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Improvement and Research

Kevin Chang, M.D.

Phone: 317-423-5533

Kevin Chang attended medical school at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, obtaining a bachelors in chemistry and his medical degree during the six-year program. After completing an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Texas Medical Branch Austin in 2007, he served as chief resident from 2007-2008. Currently his research focuses on Enhanced Laboratory Reports, a project which involves the Indiana Health Information Exchange, INPC, and clinical decision support. He is interested in further work involving valuable data aggregation techniques for healthcare providers.

Jon Duke, MD

Phone: 317-423-5532

Dr. Duke is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and completed his residency training at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. He began his Medical Informatics fellowship at the Regenstrief Institute in July 2008.

Dr. Duke's research focus is information visualization in clinical medicine, with a particular interest in the use of visualization to help physicians evaluate adverse drug reactions in complex multi-drug regimens. His other area of research is human-computer interaction in health care, with a focus on the development of novel interfaces for clinical information systems. He is fluent in Japanese and has done work with the medical informatics community in Japan. Dr. Duke continues to see patients as a practicing internist.

Sergey Gorbachev, MD

Phone: 317.423.5536

Sergey Gorbachev is a graduate of State Medical Academy, St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2007 he completed an Internal Medicine Residency Program at Lutheran Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY and in July, 2008 started Medical Informatics Fellowship at Regenstrief Institute as Gero-Informatics Fellow. Sergey is currently working on a project to use electronic medical records to improve accuracy of identifying chronic disease for older adults.

Jeff Klann, MEng

Phone: 317-423-5659

Jeff is a 2001/2004 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a BS/MEng in Computer Science. He was interested in applications of computing to improve communication, efficiency, and quality (of both processes and of life). Prior to coming here, Jeff had worked in software design for the automotive industry and done research in designing efficient, effective systems both for improving fabrication laboratories and for augmenting face-to-face communication.

Jeff's interest in medicine led him to the Regenstrief Institute, where he officially began a fellowship in August 2008. His general pursuits include: utilizing data mining and machine learning to improve quality and efficiency and reduce workload; applications of Google-like interfaces (search-based, text driven) in medical contexts; and harnessing open standards, open development, and modern software design methods to improve the quality of medical software. Currently Jeff is exploring data mining techniques to automatically generate useful decision support rules for physician order-entry systems.

Concurrently with the Fellowship, Jeff is pursuing a PhD in Health Informatics.

Please see his website at http://job.jeffklann.com for a CV and more information.

Kwangsik Nho, Ph.D.

Phone: 317-423-5537

Dr. Nho's research interest is the medical imaging genomics and data (text) mining. Prior to coming here, he had been interested in computational physics to model various physical phenomena using Monte Carlo simulation techniques.

Genome-wide association analysis has been become an important topic in genetics studies of complex diseases owing to the recent advances in high-throughput genotyping techniques. Imaging genomics is a form of genetic association analysis using a measure of brain structure (volume) as a phenotype. Currently he is analysizing genome-wide SNP data and candidate neuroimaging measures of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). In addtion, he joins into the informatics Tool Development team for MRSA Data Mining and Surveillance.

David Shepherd, MBA, DO

Dr. Shepherd is a graduate of Purdue University, University of Denver, and the Arizona Collage of Osteopathic Medicine. He finished an Internal Medicine residency in 2008 and began a Medical Informatics fellowship that same year. His research interests include Public Health Informatics, Bioinformatics, and Network Science. The main focus of his work involves the epidemiology of MRSA and providing decision support for MRSA identification. He is also interested in the molecular biology of MRSA strains and host vulnerability. A second project involves using a common data model to create a database of pathway networks from public repositories and using this database for analysis of proteomic/metabolimic data. He is interested in using network science techniques to discover novel relationships between epidemiology, genomics/proteomics, clinical, and basic science data.

Vivienne J. Zhu, MD, MS

Dr. Zhu’s interests include health data integration and clinical decision support systems, especially for preventive health and chronic disease management. Working with Regenstrief informaticians, she has succefully developed and implemented the information system for a parental smoking cessation program. She also worked on a record linkage algorithm to match and deduplicate medical records in a large regional health information organization. Working with her mentor, she developed web service-based clinical decision support system to implement childhood immunization forecasting guidelines. In addition, she expressed her passion and interests in one of the major public health challenges - Diabetes management.

Paul Biondich, MD, MS

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.

Matt Burton, MD

Dr. Burton began his medical informatics fellowship September 2005.

Dr. Burton graduated from Purdue University with a B.S. in Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biochemistry. He then attended The University of Michigan Medical School where he was very involved in educational information systems before matriculating into a categorical general surgery residency at SUNY Buffalo. After completion of his intern year, he became the clinical product manager for a market leading mobile physician information system company in Boston, MA. Dr. Burton’s research and work history include diverse areas of interest including analytical biochemistry, transplant immunology, and Lean engineering and product development/ life-cycle processes.

In addition to his fellowship, Dr. Burton is pursuing a graduate degree in Health Informatics. He has broad interests in medical informatics including personal health records (PHRs), clinical decision support, quality- process and outcomes improvement, and systems life-cycle management approaches to clinician information and communication needs. His mentors include: Drs. Mike McCoy, JT Finnell, Gunther Schadow, Burke Mamlin, and Paul Biondich. His current project involves evaluating methodologies and open technologies for the delivery of regional clinical data abstracts to meet clinician information needs. Past projects included: infrastructure for the interoperability of a personal health record (Indivo) in a regional health information exchange; developing methodologies for data capture in ambulatory care settings; methods for combining clinical and administrative data for a regional pay for performance initiative; and the costs of adverse drug events in ambulatory care settings.

James Christensen, PhD

In September 2004, Dr. Christensen joined the IU Regenstrief Medical Informatics Fellowship program, and the IU Department of Radiology as an Adjunct Assistant Professor to pursue advanced training in Medical Informatics stemming from his work on automated 3D image processing of brain images as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry & Radiology at the University of Louisville, School of Medicine. His research entailed, in part, the development of novel methods for automated processing and analysis of structural MR images and diffusion tensor images acquired for subjects and patients with psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and dyslexia. Jim’s fellowship ended in 2006.

Following his fellowship, Dr. Christensen became a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His paper, “Computer Automated Detection of Head Orientation for Prevention of Wrong-Side Treatment Errors”, has been accepted for presentation and publication for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2006 Annual Symposium.

John T. Finnell, MD, MSc

Phone: 317-423-5512

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 implementing public health measures during emergency department visits. A great example is providing a flu shot during the ED visit. These are accomplished through G-Care rules as patients present to the ED.

Jeff Friedlin, DO

Dr. Friedlin’s research interests include data mining of text documents, artificial intelligence, patient privacy protection, and studying the effective use of data contained in large electronic medical record databases. He has developed natural language processing software that can ‘read’ medical reports and extract pertinent concepts and patient data which can then be structured so that computer applications, such as clinical decision support systems, can effectively process the data. He has also developed de-identification software that accurately and automatically removes patient identifiers from medical data, resulting in de-identified data. De-identified data is more easily accessed by medical researchers

Shaun Grannis, MD

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.

Abel Kho, MD, MSc

Dr. Kho completed a B.S. degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He went on to attend medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed a Residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he stayed on to serve a year as Chief Medical Resident.

Dr. Kho trained as a National Library of Medicine Medical Informatics Fellow at Regenstrief Institute from 2003-2006. During fellowship, his initial work involved mining the RMRS to determine the utility of commonly ordered laboratory tests as predictors of mortality. His primary focus has been on developing novel tools to track and control drug-resistant infections. With ongoing funding from AHRQ, he developed an electronic citywide infection control network which enables infection control providers to effectively identify patients with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) across the Indianapolis metropolitan region.

Dr. Kho currently is Assistant Professor of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago where he also co-directs the Medical Informatics Center. He continues his infection control projects in Indianapolis as an Affiliated Scientist at Regenstrief Institute, Inc.

Burke Mamlin, MD

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.

Anna McDaniel

The focus of Dr. McDaniel’s research is on the use of technology to support smoking cessation and nicotine dependence treatment. In a series of pilot studies, Dr. McDaniel examined how to change clinical practice patterns in the acute care setting to promote smoking cessation intervention. During her fellowship, she developed computer algorithms to deliver tailored patient information to enhance "bedside" smoking cessation intervention and nicotine dependence treatment for hospitalized smokers. Currently, her research has moved beyond using information technology to enhance decision-making by clinicians to consumer health informatics, using informatics methodologies to improve health care decisions by consumers, i.e., the decision to quit smoking.

One of Dr. McDaniel’s projects led to the development of an interactive, multimedia computer program to promote smoking cessation in low-income women and involved a team of five undergraduate students in New Media. Dr. McDaniel served as producer and writer for this instructional video on smoking cessation intervention principles. The videotape product resulting from this is: “Reversing Trends: Principles of Smoking Cessation Intervention for Health Care Professionals,” McDaniel A. (available from Health Care Excel, Inc 9502 Williamsburg Plaza Suite 102, Louisville, KY 40223).

Dr. McDaniel is currently the director of the health informatics graduate program at the Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI. She also serves as director of evaluation for the National Center of Excellence in Women's Health at Indiana University and is a member of the Indiana University Cancer Center.

Susanne Ragg

Susanne Ragg, MD, PhD completed substantial training in bioinformatics at the Technical University in Copenhagen, Denmark during the fall of 2000 and 2001. She visited Germany in the summer of 2001 to learn what is being done in informatics at the German Cancer Center in Heidelberg (where she has a former mentor, Dr. Poustka) and the Computational Diagnostics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. She completed Stanford’s web-based bioinformatics course during the next several months (and subsequently taught this course to others on the IUPUI campus in Indianapolis). Dr. Ragg also learned the LINUX operating system and PERL programming. She arranged a visit to NIH where she learned a method for extracting RNA out of tumors in the clinical setting. Her formal mentor panel consisted of Dr. Clem McDonald (medical informatics), Dr. Howard Edenberg (molecular biology) and Dr. Terry Vik (pediatric hematology-oncology). During her fellowship, Dr. Ragg received a grant from the American Cancer Society for a project titled “Microarray Analysis of Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.”

Dr. Ragg is currently assistant professor, department of pediatrics, section of pediatric hematology/oncology at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN. She is the recipient and principal investigator of an NIH K-23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Career Development Award, for the project period 04/1/04 to 03/30/09, entitled “Computational Methods in Osteosarcoma Trials.” Her mentors are: Clement McDonald, MD, Munro Peacock MD, and Richard Gorlick, MD. She is also principal investigator of an award from the Indiana 21st Century Research & Technology Fund, “Center of Excellence for Computational Diagnostics” for the project period 08/20/04 to 08/20/07.She is the principal investigator for the Indiana University Cancer Center National Cancer Institute bioinformatics initiative’s Participant and Adopter Grants for the project period 08/01/04-03/07/07.

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.

Janet Tam

Dr. Tam’s research focused on the development of optimal viewer tools for presenting radiology imaging information to clinicians, and to study the effect of immediate imaging availability in one or more clinical settings. Dr. Tam reviewed several open source medical image viewers. The purpose of the evaluation was to obtain ideas on functionalities provided by the viewers. Using JAVA programming language, she also worked on development of a web-based image view program to process and display radiology images. She planned to extend the program to eventually display other medical images. The program was clinician oriented and not intended as a diagnostic reading station. In designing this viewer, Dr. Tam took note of several considerations such as the different skill levels of the users, its workability on a regular PC, the speed of image retrieval and display, and web browser security issues. She incorporated several image processing tools such as “Window and Level,” zoom functionality, magnifying glass and several measurement capabilities in her program.

Following completion of her fellowship in 2001, Dr. Tam was employed by Omniviz in Boston, MA, a company that provides unique, advanced visual informatics software, components, and services. She is no longer employed by them, and we do not know her current position or affiliation.

Daniel J. Vreeman, PT, DPT, MSc

Phone: 317-423-5515

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

Martin Were, MD MS

Phone: 317-423-5540

Dr. Were’s research interests include using informatics-based approaches to improve transition of care from the inpatient to outpatient setting. He also works on decision-support systems and handheld technology to improve the quality of care provided in resource-limited settings.

Atif Zafar

Dr. Zafar was a general internist with the Indiana University School of Medicine and Health Service Research fellow. He conducted a trial of the accuracy and usability of voice recognition in a general medicine clinic setting. This research was divided into two phases. Phase I involved the integration of current generation voice recognition technology with an enterprise level medical record system. Phase II involved testing this technology in actual use.

Dr. Zafar compared the effectiveness of voice recognition as a data entry tool compared with typing. Outcome variables included total time to type or dictate a note, accuracy of the note (error rates), completeness of the note, error correction rates and acceptability of the system to physicians. Dr. Zafar presented his work entitled “Continuous Speech Recognition in a Medical Enterprise Setting” at the 1999 Annual NLM Fellows Conference, July 1999, Arden House, New York.

Following completion of his training, Dr. Zafar was administrator of a web-based program/curriculum for Indiana University School of Medicine research faculty and staff which provided pre-tests in order to gauge knowledge base, learning materials, and links to additional and more advanced learning materials.

Currently, Dr. Zafar is an associate professor of clinical medicine at the IU School of Medicine. He is the IT Director for the AHRQ National PBRN Resource Center and a key staff member of the AHRQ National Resource Center for Health Information Technology. His research involves studying the human-computer interface and is currently working with Purdue engineers to design an EMR application for mobile devices. He also is interested in electronic technologies for clinical education. He has lead numerous national teleconferences on health information exchange and helped to architect the new AHRQ Health IT Web Resource located at http://healthit.ahrq.gov.