MI Fellowship Program Leadership

Stephen Downs, MD  Dr. Downs is 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.

Kurt Kroenke, MD  Dr. Kroenke is director of the overall IU/Regenstrief Institute Fellowship program (typically about 12 fellows), and is the associate director of, and responsible for, the research methods component of the medical informatics fellowship program. Dr. Kroenke is Professor of Medicine at Indiana University. He also directs the K-30 NIH-funded Clinical Investigator Training Enhancement (CITE) program for Indiana University. The CITE program provides a Master of Science degree in Clinical Research, and he is associate director for education in the General Clinical Research Center. He is associate director of Faculty Development and Fellowship Training for the VA Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice. 

Dr. Kroenke has directed clinical research training programs since 1988, first at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) and, since 1997, at Indiana University School of Medicine.  Dr. Kroenke personally mentored 13 generalist fellows at USUHS (1989-1997), nine fellows and six junior faculty at IU (1989-present).  Of the 28 mentees, 23 remain in academic positions, predominantly research and/or teaching.  These mentees have authored 55 publications with Dr. Kroenke, and six have received career awards: Williams, Rao, Ang, Bakas, Carney, and Bair. 
 
Dr. Kroenke’s research interests have been in the areas of common symptoms and mental disorders in primary care with a secondary interest in medical education.  He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.  He is engaged in an active portfolio of patient-oriented research including being PI on two R01s funding effectiveness trials for treating depression and pain in primary care patients (NIMH) and cancer patients (NCI). Besides being the PI on the K-30, he was also PI for a number of years on a T-32 training grant for training health services researchers and a faculty development grant from that funded innovative methods of training outcome researchers.
 

Other Core Faculty

Medical Informatics Faculty Members

Michael Barnes, MD Dr. Barnes is an associate professor of family medicine, IU School of Medicine; and Regenstrief Research Scientist.  He is an expert in JAVA, object-oriented programming, relational databases and human interface design.  Dr. Barnes has 33 years of experience with computer systems development.   Dr. Barnes provides lectures on JAVA, software engineering and system design. 

Paul Biondich, MD  Dr. Biondich is a past RI medical informatics fellow and is now Assistant 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.  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.

Aaron E. Carroll, MD, MS  Dr. Carroll is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and a member of the Children's Health Services Research Group. His past work includes research on the use of handheld devices by clinicians, and their ability to reduce documentation errors in a neonatal intensive care unit. Dr. Carroll's current research covers a wide range of health services and informatics areas, but primarily concentrates on the use of information technology, primarily mobile technology, to improve health outcomes in patients with chronic disease.

Paul Dexter, MD  Dr. Dexter is an associate profess or clinical medicine, IU School of Medicine and Chief Medical Information Officer and Director of Clinical Applications, Wishard Hospital.  Dr. Dexter has implemented several large randomized trials of computer reminders and computer "standing orders" related to preventive care and advance directives.  The results of these trials were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA and Annals of Internal Medicine.  Given his research background, leadership role at Wishard Hospital and management of the programmers, Dr. Dexter has been able to facilitate many of the informatics-related fellows' projects.

Shaun Grannis, MD  Dr. Grannis came to us from and had a long-term interest in computers, going back to his undergraduate days at MIT where he studied aeronautics and astronautics.  His first project was to determine the choice of the best set of identifying keys for the purpose of linking patients from different databases.  As a former RI medical informatics fellow, for his work in de-identified record linkage, Dr. Grannis won first place in the student paper competition and the Martin Epstein Award for outstanding contribution to the body of medical informatics knowledge at the 2002 AMIA Annual Fall Symposium.  Dr. Grannis is currently assistant professor, department of family medicine, IU School of Medicine, Indiana University and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute and is principal investigator on two grants.  One is funded by CDC and the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) to develop, maintain and operate a system for capturing hospital emergency department admission data and transmit it to the ISDH Public Health Emergency Surveillance System (“PHESS").  The other grant, funded by NLM, is entitled “Syndromic Surveillance Data Exchange and Analysis.”  Dr. Grannis contributes lectures to the fellowship curriculum and provides key guidance to fellows' research projects.

Siu Hui, PhD  Dr. Hui is Associate Director of Biostatistics Dr. Hui is Professor of Medicine and is responsible for the quantitative sciences. Courses in this area are taught by Dr. Hui and faculty of the IU School of Medicine's Department of Medicine's Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology. She also oversees the statistical and epidemiologic rigor of fellowship clinical epidemiologic and developmental projects. Although fellows are expected to perform their own descriptive and comparative statistical tests, Dr. Hui works closely with fellows on more advanced methods (e.g., multivariable regression, logistic regression, and proportional hazards modelling).

John T. Finnell, MD, MSc  Dr. Finnell is co-director of the NLM-funded Medical Informatics Fellowship Program  Dr. Finnell is a graduate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine and board certified in emergency medicine.  Dr. Finnell joined the fellowship program 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 15, 2003.  During his fellowship, Dr. Finnell earned a master’s degree in the NIH-funded CITE program.

Dr. Finnell is currently associate professor of emergency medicine, 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. 

Burke Mamlin, MD Dr. Mamlin is a past RI medical informatics fellow has served as a mentor for current fellow, Linas Simonaitis, and is an advisor to several of the fellows, teaches fellowship courses on XML and XSLT, and has led the creation and evolution of the fellowship website.

Anna McDaniel, DNS, RN Dr. McDaniel is Director of the Health Informatics Graduate Program at the IU School of Informatics and Associate Professor at the IU School of Nursing. A former informatics fellow, her research is focused on consumer health informatics and clinical decision support to promote smoking cessation and treatment of nicotine dependence. Current projects include using interactive gaming technology to prevent smoking initiation in pre-adolescent girls and developing an integrated smoking relapse prevention system using automated telephony.

Julie McGowan, PhD Dr. McGowan is Associate Dean for Information Resources and Education Technology, Professor of Knowledge Informatics and Director of the Ruth Lilly Medical Library. Her research interests include evidence utilities in decision support, economic impact and human factors in telemedicine and technology implementation, and tools and outcomes of medical informatics education. Dr. McGowan was formerly an Associate Dean at the University of Vermont where she served as Co-PI for the Vermont IAIMS and has been on the IAIMS Board for the past eight years. As one of the developers of VTMEDNET, Vermont's comprehensive, statewide health information network, she has extensive experience in both planning and execution of integrated information systems from the user's perspective. She is the director of the nation's only national outreach mapping center, which is located at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library.

Marc Rosenman, MD Dr. Rosenman is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Children's Health Services Research Section. He focuses on analyzing data from the Regenstrief Medical Records System to address clinical research questions. Additional work centers on large administrative data sets, risk modeling, and chronic disease management. Dr. Rosenman teaches several sessions in the clinical research methods course for fellows and junior faculty.

Gunther Schadow, MD, PhD  Dr. Schadow received his MD from Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany and his PhD in medical informatics from Free University Berlin, Germany. In 1998, he joined the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine as a visiting associate scientist.  Dr. Schadow is currently Associate Professor of Informatics, IU School of Informatics at IUPUI, and Research Scientist, Regenstrief Institute, Inc.  He joined the School of Informatics to develop the medical informatics program beginning November 2004. 

Dr. Schadow has been a leader in healthcare information standards for several years. He has developed most of the clinical side of the HL7 version 3.0 information model in collaboration with other HL7 members who represent the key companies including laboratory and pathology information systems vendors in the medical information system industry. He has also developed a proposed standard for the syntax and semantic of units of measure published in JAMIA, which is now recommended by the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services. He has designed the HL7 version 3 data type specification. He has been co-leading medical device vendors and the FDA on a specification for EKG and other waveform data. He is currently under two contracts with the FDA to design two standards related to drug-knowledge: (1) e-Stability test data submission and (2) Structured Product Labeling (SPL) release 2, which will represent key knowledge in computer-actionable form that can drive decision support functionality in computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems.

Dr. Schadow is principal investigator for a grant funded by AHRQ entitled “Value of New Drug Labeling Knowledge for e-Prescribing” to create new knowledge and evidence regarding the benefits of uniform standards for health information for the dissemination of computer-actionable knowledge that can improve patient safety and quality of care and for the development and implementation of HIT in diverse health care settings.

William Tierney, MD  Dr. Tierney is Chancellor's Professor of Medicine; Director, Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics; and Director, International Clinical Research, Indiana University School of Medicine.  Dr. Tierney is an internationally recognized expert in medical informatics and health services research, known for implementing and using electronic medical record (EMR) systems to enhance quality of care.  He has conducted and published more randomized trials of EMR systems than any other researcher.  He is renowned for his development of medical informatics innovations and their rigorous evaluation through randomized controlled trials in primary care and for his analysis of clinical and administrative databases to assess patient risk, comorbidity and clinical outcomes.  He was first to demonstrate that computerization of hospital orders can substantially reduce cost and medical errors.  The technology he evaluated now supports care for a large US inner-city healthcare system and an African HIV/AIDS population.
 
His innovations receiving international recognition include computer-based reminders and feedback reports that improved preventive care, disease management and doctor-patient discussions about end-of-life costs and increased quality of care with the collaboration of Dr. Dexter.  In collaboration with Drs. Mamlin and Biondich he has created and implemented sub-Saharan Africa's first outpatient EMR system, African Medical Record System (AMRS), now with >300,000 visits for >90,000 patients from 12 Kenyan health centers.

Daniel Vreeman, PT, DPT  Dr. Vreeman received a BA in biological sciences from Cornell University and a doctor of physical therapy (DPT) from Duke University.  As an RI medical informatics fellow, Dr. Vreeman’s primary research activities focused on developing a refined, automated method of mapping legacy radiology codes to LOINC.  He built upon the existing automated mapping program contained in the Regenstrief LOINC Mapping Assistant (RELMA®), called Intelligent Mapper. He worked on refinements in the mapping process including using CPT4 codes to narrow the space of possible candidate LOINC codes. Dr. Vreeman conducted a systematic review of electronic health record systems that have been implemented in settings in which physical therapists practice.  He collaborated with colleagues in the department of pediatrics in work to evaluate compliance with guidelines for ADHD diagnosis and treatment. In this collaboration, Dr. Vreeman designed and implemented an OCR-enabled chart review form which allowed automated population of a compliance database from paper-based forms.  While an informatics fellow, he earned a master’s degree in the NIH-funded CITE program with an emphasis on medical informatics.

Dr. Vreeman is Assistant Research Professor of Physical Therapy, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Indiana University, and a Research Scientist at the Regenstrief Institute.  His primary research interests are the use of standardized clinical vocabularies to support electronic health information exchange for clinical practice and research.

Michael Weiner, MD, MPH Dr. Weiner is Assistant Professor of Medicine and is interested in improving organization and delivery of health services for older adults. He also studies the effects of health information on physicians' practices. He is now pursuing his long-term interest in bridging informatics and geriatrics by studying ways to improve coordination and quality of care for older people.

Dr. Weiner leads Regenstrief's randomized trial of video conferencing in Wishard Health Service's nursing home and is heavily involved with the analysis of Medicare claims data from central Indiana merged with the Regenstrief clinical data repository in order to identify patterns of health care and specific indicators of quality.

Imaging Informatics Faculty Members

A number of IU faculty members are experts in medical and research imaging. These individuals will participate in the Medical Informatics lecture series to provide general background in imaging informatics and may serve as research mentors to fellows who have a special interest in imaging informatics.

Gary Hutchins, PhD Dr. Hutchins is a Professor of Radiology and head of the Indiana Center for Bio Imaging Excellence. The primary objective of his biomedical imaging program is the development and application of imaging technologies to monitor physiologic and biochemical process non-invasively in humans and research animals. These imaging technologies are used to study normal physiologic processes, modification of these processes in disease, and the response to therapeutic strategies used to minimize the effects of disease. These imaging tools are used in a broad spectrum of medical disciplines' including but not limited to oncology, neuroscience, and cardiovascular science and are heavily dependent on computers and computer algorithms.

Shiaofen Fang, PhD Dr. Fang is an Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science. His research interests include computer graphics, scientific visualization, geometric modeling, and their biomedical applications. He has worked collaboratively with a number of biomedical researchers, and developed novel techniques and algorithms in volume rendering, immersive visualization systems, deformation modeling, 3D biomedical imaging, and network-based visualization.

Kenneth Dunn, PhD Dr. Dunn is a member of the Division of Nephrology in the Department of Medicine. He runs the confocal and 2 photon microscopes that can generate 3 dimensional images of living cells at the 3-4 micron level of resolution.

Bioinformatics Faculty Members

A number of IU faculty members are experts in medical and research imaging. These individuals will participate in the Medical Informatics lecture series to and serve as mentors to fellows who would like a special emphasis of bioinformatics.

Howard Edenberg, PhD Dr. Edenberg is the Chancellor's Professor of the Department of Biochemistry. He directs the Center for Medical Genomics at Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Edenberg recently established a $2.5 million micro array facility, funded through a competitive grant from the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund that will be enlarged and extended to include genotyping as part of the Indiana Genomics Initiative (INGEN). His interests include gene expression analysis by micro arrays, and the genetics of complex diseases. He has become very interested in bioinformatics technology as part of his micro array analysis and his research in both areas involves bioinformatics.

Lang Li, PhD  Dr. Li is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (section of Biostatistics). He is a recent recruit from the University of Michigan. Dr. Li has a special interest in statistical methods to analyze micro array data (gene classification, gene selection, disease type prediction). He is also interested in statistical models for the longitudinal data (longitudinal response with longitudinal co variates) of special relevance to epidemiologic analysis of long-term electronic medical record databases.

Tom Hurley, PhD Dr. Hurley is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His laboratory is one of three different research groups within the Center for Structural Biology that utilize X-ray crystallography as an approach to understanding biochemical processes. Dr. Hurley's laboratory has determined the three-dimensional structures of human alcohol and aldehyde dehydrogenases, mammalian casein kinase Id, and mammalian glycogenic. He is also involved in efforts to more completely define the substrate preferences and mechanistic properties by a combination of experimental approaches such as, steady-state and transient-state enzyme kinetics and the evaluation of ligand binding thermodynamics through fluorescence spectroscopy and BiaCore measurements. Computers and mathematic modeling techniques underpin all of this research.

Brian Guenther, PhD Dr. Guenther is a Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine who is initiating structure and function studies on proteins involved in regulating and maintaining the cytoskeleton. Mutations in these proteins result in an earlier onset of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Bioinformatics is central to project selection and characterization for successful completion of this work.

Susanne Ragg, MD, PhD Dr. Ragg is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics. She has a PhD in Human Genetics and completed her fellowship in Hematology/Oncology prior to her fellowship in Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute. During her fellowship she spent three months at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis at the Technical University of Denmark, and three months at the German Cancer Center in Heidelberg, Germany. Her research interests include clinical proteomics, medical applications of high throughput technologies, and biomedical data visualization and integration.