Regenstrief Institute, Inc. Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Improvement and Research Indiana Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics

Jeanne Ballard, M.D., F.A.C.O.G.

After sixteen years as a busy obstetrician/gynecologist in a large group practice in South Bend, Jeanne Ballard is taking her medical career in a new direction. Her goal is to put health information technology to work to improve reproductive health care. The Institute’s first ob/gyn fellow, Jeanne plans to use this mid-career training opportunity to develop ways to track and affect patient safety, ultimately influencing national policy. Although she wanted to be a doctor since childhood, her engineer father encouraged her to follow in his footsteps. Jeanne received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from Ohio State but followed her initial inclination and applied to medical school, obtaining her M.D. degree at OSU, where she also completed her four year residency in ob/gyn.

Active at both the district and national levels in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Jeanne currently serves as ACOG District V Secretary and in October becomes District Vice-Chair, the first woman to have attained this leadership position in the group which includes physicians from Indiana, Kentucky Michigan, Ohio and Ontario.“The Regenstrief fellowship is just the opportunity I need to acquire computer skills, gain an in depth understanding of medical record systems like the RMRS, and learn how these tools can make a difference in the healthcare provided to women of all ages. I love ob/gyn and hope to help my field catch up to internal medicine and other specialties that have already harnessed the power of health information technology,” she says.Jeanne notes that working as an obstetrician has been described as being a bit like being a pilot – hours of routine followed by moments of sheer terror. In this new phase of her professional life, she says there will be little routine as she works on improving outcomes and influencing the current and future generations of ob/gyns.

Jason Cadwallader, M.D.

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Jason Cadwallader attended a Quaker-affiliated high school and, being the son of two alums, his enrollment at Richmond, Indiana’s Earlham College, a Quaker institution, was almost pre-ordained. Whether preordained or not, it turned out to be a great fit for Jason. At Earlham, he majored in biochemistry, excelling at anatomy and physiology and other courses that put him on the trajectory toward medical school. He also met his chemistry lab partner and future wife, Nicole.

Following graduation, Jason decided to take some time off before medical school. While Nicole finished her final year at Earlham, Jason worked in Indy as an Emergency Medical Technician, getting the opportunity to see medicine in action. He then joined Teach for America, one of the nation's largest providers of teachers for low-income communities, a program which has been called the Peace Corps for America’s schools. He was assigned to teach physical sciences to ninth graders in the La Joya, Texas School District, along the Rio Grande River. Ninety-nine percent of students in the district, one of the fastest growing in the U.S., are Hispanic with slightly over half having only a limited proficiency in English. Ninety-two percent are economically disadvantaged with some not having running water and/or electricity in their homes.

“What will stay with me about my two years with Teach for America is both the passion I’ve found for teaching and a respect for the efforts and determination so many teachers put forth to educate our country’s children,” Jason says. Following his two year stint in the Lone Star State, it was back to the Keystone State where he enrolled in Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine. Jason confirms that yes, it’s true. Hershey, PA. smells like chocolate. But, after four years in America’s chocolate capital, he also passes along a bit of little known information about Hershey. There are lots of cows required to produce milk chocolate and, depending on the direction of the wind, the sweet smell of chocolate is not infrequently replaced by the not so sweet smell of manure. Not because of the odor, but after medical school Jason departed Hershey, which he describes as a really cool place, returning to the Hoosier state for an internal medicine residency at the IU School of Medicine. It was during an informatics elective at the Institute during his third year, that he found what he was looking for career wise — medical informatics.

Following a year as chief resident at IU Hospital, Jason has come to the Institute with the goal of going into academic medicine. He is excited about the prospects of learning and ultimately teaching medical students and residents. Nicole is also in education. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in science education at IU in Bloomington. Jason and Nicole have a young son named Sidney, born in February 2011. Most of Jason’s spare time is spent with his family. But he has been carving out time every Thursday evening to play his favorite sport-Ultimate Frisbee-in a coed Indianapolis league. Ultimate Frisbee is played on a football size field with seven players per team and is a cross between the flow of soccer and some of the rules of basketball played on a football field, using a Frisbee of course.

Adam Culbertson

First year informatics fellow Adam Culbertson is a native of Auburn, located north of Fort Wayne, the son of a retired auto stamping factory electrician and a homemaker. Now a quiet town, Auburn was one of the early capitals of the American automobile industry – the home of the fabled Auburns, Cords and Duesenbergs. Graduating from high school, Adam headed to IU in Bloomington where he earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in chemistry. He then spent three months with an American medical missionary in Costa Rica backpacking into the jungle to volunteer at an isolated health clinic. Adam describes the work as extremely rewarding and says he learned a lot. There are many things to improve health care in the developing world that are very easy and cheap that can make a huge difference, he observed.

Returning to the U.S., Adam worked as a medical historian and screened potential donors for Biolife Plasma Services. Adam then landed a job with a new Bloomington start-up called Predictive Physiology and Medicine, founded by some of the country’s leading academicians. Adam was hired on as a laboratory technician and had the opportunity to write a manuscript on the emerging field of personalized medicine. Working for the startup changed his views and perspectives on medicine, awakened a strong interest in entrepreneurship and, he says, forced him to focus on technology as a catalyst to change healthcare. After the demise of the start-up, he entered graduate school at IU-B and accepted a position with Cook Pharmica as a quality control analyst. While pursuing his masters degree in informatics he completed the Kelley School’s The Business of the Life Sciences certificate program.

After about a year of working full time while attending grad school he left the work world to focus on his studies. He soon found himself interested in identifying problems and designing technological solutions that did not, as he puts it, allow the technology to get in the way. He is poised to complete his master’s degree start a PhD program in health informatics at IUPUI in 2012. Although plans for his fellowship project have not been finalized, he is interested in exploring ways in which technology can improve health outcomes and patients’ overall experiences. He is also interested in health applications that can encourage consumers to make better and more informed decisions about their health. When not thinking about human-computer interactions or programming puzzles, Adam enjoys cycling and basketball as well as traveling and, upon occasion, playing guitar.

Mustafa Fidahussein, M.D.

Although originally from Tanzania, Mustafa grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates where his family was part of a large expatriate community. Always interested in computers, he considered careers in engineering or medicine. With maternal encouragement, he chose to become a physician (the first in his family) and decided to attend medical school in Hungary, a country known for its outstanding universities. During his six years at the University of Szeged, Mustafa enjoyed life in a historic university town where his classes were taught in English. After completing medical school, he headed back to a Tanzania he hardly remembered. There, he built his programming proficiency working as a computer consultant. Having lived in Africa, Asia and Europe, he made the decision to venture to a new continent. Journeying to the U.S., he completed an internal medicine residency at Resurrection-Westlake Community Hospital in Chicago. Mustafa then worked for over 3 years as a hospitalist at Maryland General Hospital.

As his career progresses he says he has grown to appreciate his decision to specialize in internal medicine. Mustafa reflects “having been a stranger in so many cultures makes adapting to new places part of my being.” He looks forward to exploring Indianapolis and walking and biking to work. But what really excites him is the opportunity to build his computer and clinical skills and to be part of a community of like-minded individuals. While they originally come from very different spots around the globe, the four new informatics fellows bring to Indianapolis similar desires to learn from and contribute to the Institute community.

Judy Wawira Gichoya, M.B.Ch.B

Born in Nairobi, Judy Wawira Gichoya moved up-country to a central Kenyan village as a child. Growing up she was interested in aviation and in computers. But, she says, in her country, students who do well in school typically are pushed toward careers in medicine or engineering. Distinguishing herself at a national girls boarding school near Mt. Kenya National Park and excelling in her national college placement exams, Judy made an initial stop at Strathmore University, a private institution in Nairobi specializing in commerce and information technology. In her two years at Strathmore studying accounting (following in her dad’s footsteps) and computer science, she qualified as a Certified Public Accountant and earned diplomas in web and database programming and in administration. Judy then entered Moi University Faculty of Medicine, where clinical sciences are taught simultaneously with basic sciences for all six years of medical school. During medical school she did a two-month internal medicine rotation at Miriam Hospital in Providence, R.I. and participated in a month long research training program in Hanoi, Vietnam.“I didn’t really like medicine at first, but I have grown to like it. But I like working with computers more,” she notes.

Following graduation with a M.B.Ch.B degree (the British equivalent of an M.D.) in 2009, she spent six months at the University of Nairobi School of Computing and Informatics as a health informatics intern. Then it was back to medical practice as she completed a compulsory one year internship rotating through internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics and obstetrics at a high volume hospital, concluding her training two months ago. In high school, Judy taught her classmates about computers because she was intrigued by technology and there was no teacher trained in the field. While in medical school she programmed for OpenMRS. A post-medical school health informatics internship stoked her desire to perfect her programming skills and cemented her interest in using informatics to improve the delivery of healthcare in developing countries. Judy views the fellowship is a perfect fit and is very excited about the opportunity to learn from her new Institute colleagues. She looks forward to in country application and passing this knowledge along when she returns to Kenya for the second year of the fellowship. The Center of Excellence in Health Informatics Fellowship will make her one of very few trained specialists in a country with a great need. She relishes the opportunities that will be open for her. “Ultimately, I see myself as an entrepreneur. It may be in a health related field but it may not, but the knowledge and skills I gain over the next two years will be invaluable.While in the U.S., Judy hopes to travel, perhaps visiting Disney World, and looks forward with a bit of trepidation to her first exposure to snow and cold weather, which she has been old is depressing. Her heart remains abroad – in Kenya with her 8 year old daughter Crystal, and in Australia with her partner, Wachira, who is studying nursing Down Under.

Tim Imler, M.D.

If it hadn’t been for legal issues over the name he gave his social networking service in 2000, Tim Imler might have beaten Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook fame, to the development of social media. Tim and his older brother grew up in Lima, Ohio rounding in hospitals with their nephrologist father and wanting to be physicians. While in junior high, Tim began programming computers. In high school he ran a dial-in electronic bulletin board system out of a friend’s basement. By 1996 his website FileCity.com, a distributor of MIDI (precursor of MP3) files, was the 13th most visited website in the world and was featured in the news in Sweden. Like it’s successor Napster, FileCity was ultimately shut down. Then it was on to Miami University of Ohio, where he earned degrees in zoology (a typical MU pre-med major) and finance. Here Tim developed My University Chat (MUChat.com), a social networking service which he later shut down.

After graduating from Miami, he attended medical school at Case Western University. By his third year he decided to go into gastroenterology, attracted by the opportunity to do procedures. While at Case, Tim founded Trophic Limited, LLC, an online medical student education community, which he later sold to a non-profit education company.He matched at Indiana University School of Medicine for his internal medicine residency and after three years served as chief resident at IU Hospital. Based on his previous programming experience, he founded The Imlers, LLC, which develops internet-based physician tools targeted to gastroenterologist and medical education projects. Tim is a dual IU gastroenterology and Regenstrief medical informatics fellow. He has finished year one of the fellowship in the GI Division. During years two and three he will spend 80 percent of his time at Regenstrief and in the fourth year will be back in the GI Division. Tim and his wife Geri, a fellow Miami University of Ohio alum, have been married for nine years and are the proud parents of four-year-old twins Abigail and Emma and two-year-old Sophie. The girls participate in many activities including dance, gymnastics, and tae kwon do. Most of Tim’s leisure time is spent with his family.

Aggrey Keny, M.B.Ch.B

“I realized very early on that I wanted something that would impact people directly, rather than through machines. We are very poor in rural Kenya with high levels of malaria and other infectious diseases. I wanted to help and medicine seemed the clearest path to do so,” he recalls. Following medical school, he spent a compulsory internship year rotating through internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics and obstetrics and gynecology at a large hospital, where he sometimes would see 100 patients a day. He then served for two years as a medical officer in a smaller hospital in charge of outpatient clinics seeing patients with diabetes, hypertension and other chronic diseases.He was selected as a medical superintendent of another hospital with responsibilities for medical and administrative leadership. In 2010 he was promoted to his current assignment: Ministry of Public Health and Sanitation District Medical Officer of Health (DMOH) in Nandi North District. In this position he manages and coordinates national health policy in the district, located in the Rift Valley not far from Lake Victoria. Here he supervises hospitals, mission hospitals, private clinics, health centers and dispensaries.

Throughout his career, and especially in his current position, he has been frustrated. “We need electronic medical records, but we need much more. We have piles and piles of forms. We need the ability to transmit data from institution to institution electronically so that the nurse, who is the sole provider of care at a rural dispensary doesn’t have to close one day a week to bring her report to the district office. We need the ability to hire and assign staff when and where they are needed,” he says.“I was the first one in my medical school class to have a computer. But computers may only be part of the answer to our needs. Everyone has cell phones and they may be a key, affordable part of the solution.”Aggrey is on a study leave from his job as he undertakes the two year health informatics fellowship with the goal of increasing efficiency and problem solving in his district and ultimately throughout Kenya. “I am the person on the ground. I know what we need. I just need to learn how to implement it cost effectively.”

Justin Morea, D.O.

A self-described lifelong geek, Justin Morea is a newly minted physician with long time interest in the interaction between humans and their computers. Growing up in the New Jersey outskirts of Philadelphia, the son of a radiologist father and a homemaker mother, Justin always wanted to be a doctor. The medical gene clearly runs in the family as his younger sister is a pediatrics resident in Pennsylvania. A brother is a teacher. Majoring in computer science and in biology at Lehigh University, Justin graduated with both a B.S. and a B.A. He then attended Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) and received a D.O. degree from the Blacksburg, VA institution. Subsequently he moved to Newark, Delaware, where he completed a year long osteopathic rotating internship followed by a three-year internal medicine residency, both at Christiana Care Health System.

During his residency Justin learned that the hospital had a Chief Medical Information Officer. He sought out the CMIO and enlisted as a guinea pig in the system’s quest to integrate health information technology into patient care. Later he joined the team that rolled out the hospital’s computerized physician order entry system. Eventually he became a health information system ambassador within Christiana helping physicians adapt to and improve the new system. His final project in Newark was the redesign of an eSignOut program used by residents and hospitalists. Completing his residency this summer, Justin arrived at the Institute eager to focus on user interface and other usability related issues.

Xiaodong Peng, Ph.D.

Xiaodong was raised on a military base in Beijing, the son of a Chinese Army officer. After high school, he passed the demanding examinations required to become a Chinese Air Force Academy cadet but ultimately turned down the opportunity to become a bomber pilot in order to focus on science. At Beijing Normal University, he majored in biochemistry and subsequently worked for five years as a laboratory teaching and research assistant at Beijing Medical University. There, he became a lecturer and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology.

After considering various postdoctoral training positions in the United States, Austria and Greece, Xiaodong selected the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and later IUSM’s Herman B. Wells Center for Pediatric Research. He subsequently became a research associate at the Wells Center.Following fourteen years in academia, he left the ivory tower for a six-year stint as a biochemist with Semafore Pharmaceuticals, Inc. of Westfield, a clinical-stage biotech company dedicated to discovery and development of novel small molecule therapeutics. Last year, he returned to IU as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. His work there led him to the Institute’s fellowship and the opportunity to develop greater expertise in the informatics part of bioinformatics with the goal of accelerating the process of making biologic discoveries accessible to clinicians. In his spare time, Xiaodong enjoys watching the Discovery, National Geographic and Nature channels on television and listening to classic rock music, especially the Beatles. He and his significant other, Institute International Health Data Coordinator Ada Yeung, are veteran karaoke performers. Although he now lives in Carmel, elevation 829 feet, Xiaodong says he most enjoys what he calls vertical scenery – mountains and big trees.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 pursued a PhD in Health Informatics.

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

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.

Nareesa Mohammed-Rajput, MD, MPH, FACP

Dr. Mohammed-Rajput graduated from the American University of the Caribbean and finished her residency in internal medicine at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. She worked as a physician informatician while getting her Masters of Public Health and upon graduation, started her Medical Informatics fellowship at Regenstrief Institute in July 2008.

Her informatics interests include global informatics and implementation science. She is interested in implementing EHRs in resource-constrained environments and determining factors of successful implementations. Concurrent with her research, Dr. Mohammed-Rajput still sees patients both in an inpatient and outpatient capacity.

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.

Susanne Ragg, MD, PhD

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.

Zeshan Rajput, MD, MPH, FACP

Phone: 317-423-5631

Dr. Rajput is a medical informatics fellow training under an NLM-sponsored program at the Regenstrief Institute. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2001 with a Bachelor's Degree in Biology and a minor in Computer Science. He subsequently graduated from Ross University School of Medicine in 2005 and from a residency in Internal Medicine at St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 2009. While in residency, he received recognition from the Maryland Chapter of the American College of Physicians for his work on detection of co-morbid diseases based on data in a simple electronic medical record system. Immediately after residency, he joined the Regenstrief Institute. He concurrently serves as an Assistant Professor and Lecturer of Clinical Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. He is also completing a Master's Degree in Clinical Research at Indiana University. His focus as an informatics fellow is on task shifting of clinical workflows and other patient facing applications in resource constrained environments. He is currently developing and deploying a system for patients and field-workers to interact directly with an electronic medical record system via cellular phones.

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.

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.

Matthew Stephens, M.D.

Matt is not the first in his family to pursue a healthcare related career-it’s the Sinclair family profession. Matt’s father is a retired oncologist and his mother is a retired physical therapist. His sister is an occupational therapist and his younger brother was Matt’s medical school classmate and today is a radiology resident at the University of Florida. In the spirit of complete disclosure, it should be noted that Matt’s elder brother works in filmmaking, not health care. As a child, Matt wanted to be an astronaut, an aspiration fueled by summers at space camp. After high school, where he played baseball and briefly dreamed of a career in the Major Leagues, he attended IU-Bloomington and majored in chemistry. Rather than finding a lab job, he pursued a master’s degree in computer science, worked at the IU Center for Medical Genomics, and also earned a master’s degree in physiology. He then enrolled in the IU School of Medicine where after graduation he completed a surgical internship.

Matt plans to be at the Institute for only one year. After that he begins a four year radiology residency at the University of Louisville. He is especially interested in nuclear medicine. Matt and his wife Nancy, a former elementary school teacher, have two children – Sophia, age four, and Jack, age one. In his spare time, Matt enjoys child-centered activities and reading on his Sony E-reader. While at the Institute, he is focusing on determining what clinical data radiologists need when reading scans and how best to bring that data to them. Initially Matt will be surveying radiologists; he then hopes to design programs to capture the data they need and make that information available when they need it. He says he applied for the Institute fellowship to learn how to develop and implement more decision support tools for radiologists.

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.

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.