Accelerating Public Health Situational Awareness through Health Information Exchanges

February 6, 2008 – November 5, 2009

Funding source: Centers for Disease Control

Regenstrief Institute is working with state, regional and non-geographic health information exchanges to enable access to clinical care information at all levels of public health for the purposes of improved public health situational awareness and case reporting in the context of the emerging Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) (see NHIN project for additional details).

Advancing Patient Identity Management in the Context of Real-World Health Information

October 1, 2009 through September 30, 2012

Funding source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Healthcare information is increasingly distributed across many independent databases and systems, both within and among organizations as separate islands with different patient identifiers. Regenstrief Investigators seek to create a more robust and efficient global patient matching algorithm. Aggregation is important not only to determine a patient's health care status, but also for clinical effectiveness research, drug safety research and other population-based studies requiring comprehensive data.

An Evolving Statewide Indiana Information Infrastructure

September 30, 2004 through March 31, 2009

Funding Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

This project builds on existing statewide initiatives of the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH), the State's Medicaid program and Indiana University School of Medicine.  We will work to achieve our region's goals by building on these established local and regional health information infrastructure initiatives.  We have been very active in sharing our learning points with others across the country through presentations, testimony and publications and believe we can provide an excellent example for other states.

Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics (ICEPHI)

September 1, 2009 through August 31, 2013

Funding source: Centers for Disease Control

This collaborative seeks to enhance the ways public health practitioners exchange information effectively with other community partners, such as healthcare providers, regional health information organizations, and health plans, and respond to the information.

Clinical Decision Support Consortium

March 5, 2008 through March 4, 2010

Funding source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Investigators and developers of electronic health records from both academe and industry have come together to form the Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Consortium. Members are intimately involved in creating and providing CDS tools and services in electronic health records used in both academic settings as well as community-based physician office practices. The goal of this contract is to assess, define, demonstrate, and evaluate best practices for knowledge management and clinical decision support in healthcare information technology at scale – across multiple ambulatory care settings and HER technology platforms.

Clinical Knowledge Hub - Conceptual Integration of Rules, Data Sets, and Queries

May 1, 2009 through April 30, 2011

Funding source: NIH – National Library of Medicine

Investigators at Regenstrief Institute are creating new methods for translating and sharing medical knowledge that different computer systems use to aid healthcare providers make better decisions. The project will show how one can bridge the deep rifts between different ways of describing medical knowledge, and if successful, would lead to wider sharing of medical knowledge helping to improve quality and reduce the cost of health care.

Creating a Prognostic Model for Melanoma Patients

June 21, 2008 – May 31, 2010

Funding source: Clarian

The goal of this project is to better understand the various factors that affect survival in patients with melanoma. To achieve this understanding, we will collect and analyze the large amount of data contained in the electronic medical records of all patients with melanoma in the Clarian Health System. Physicians caring for patients with melanoma are frequently asked questions about prognosis. Answers to these questions affect a patients’ quality of life and personal plans. Accurate knowledge of a patient’s prognosis also greatly affects doctors’ decisions about patient treatment and is needed for optimal management and follow-up.

Creation, Maintenance and Distribution of Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC®)

February, 2003 through July, 2008  and

August, 2008 through July, 2013

Funding source: NIH – National Library of Medicine

The Regenstrief Institute has been a leader and active participant in medical informatics standards development. Regenstrief investigators organized the first medical informatics effort in 1984, wrote the ASTM and HL7 chapters for orders and observation reporting, were the lead authors of the unified (USAMP) data HL7 data model, the HL7 version 3 data types, and the proposed HIPAA claims attachments documents. IU/Regenstrief Institute initiated the LOINC® vocabulary standards for observations which have been adopted by the largest commercial laboratories and most Federal agencies (CDC, DOD, HCFA). Fellows will have opportunities to develop research projects related to any of the above.

I3: The Indiana IAIMS Initiative

September 15, 2004 through September 14, 2009

Funding Source: NIH – National Library of Medicine

The goal of the Indiana (IAIMS) Initiative (I3) is to create an integrated, Indianapolis MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) wide clinical data and knowledge information management system that serves the needs of patient care, public health, education, policy generation and research.  The information management system will be used by patients, health care providers, public health officials, educators, policy makers and researchers.  The system will be an extension of the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) system that has been operational for over five years.

Impact of Using Nurses Instead of Clinicians to Care for Stable HIV-infected Patients

October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009

Funding source: Tibotec’s REACH Initiative

Investigators with the Regenstrief Institute are evaluating the impact of using staff other than physicians to care for stable HIV-infected patient at two clinics in Western Kenya.

Improving Laboratory Follow-up by Delivering an Enhanced Medication List to Outpatient Physician Practices

September 28, 2007 through April 30, 2010

Funding source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Investigators at Regenstrief Institute are seeking to improve laboratory follow-up by providing outpatient primary care clinicians with a Medication List, based on the medications that have been dispensed to the patient at a pharmacy. Some categories of Decision Support alerts will also be provided with the Medication List. This will be available to the physician prior to the patient encounter and can be used as an important tool to improve health care quality and safety.

Improving Management of Test Results that Return After Hospital Discharge

October 1, 2009 through September 30, 2013

Funding source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Poor follow-up of tests whose results are not back at the time of hospital discharge leads to many medical errors. This project seeks to create, implement, and evaluate two health information technology interventions aimed at improving communication and follow-up of these tests. Through these interventions, it is hoped there is a reduction medical errors and a demonstrated improvement in safety for patients discharged from the hospital with pending results.

Indiana State Department of Health Public Health Emergency Surveillance System (PHESS)

July 12, 2004 through August 1, 2009 and

August 10, 2009 through August 9, 2010

Funding Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/ISDH

Because of Regenstrief Institute Inc.'s long-term experience with and expertise in electronic clinical data capture, standard clinical vocabularies, clinical terminology mapping, HL7 messages, system interfacing, its long term history of successful linking of many hospitals in Indiana, and its understanding of public health and biosurveillance needs, the Indiana State Department of Health ("ISDH") contracted with Regenstrief Institute Inc. 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").

Modeling the Effect of Drugs in Intergromics by Linking Drug Ontology and Pathways

December 1, 2008 through November 30, 2011

Funding source: NIH – National Institute of General Medical Sciences

Regenstrief Institute investigators are working to link drug therapies found in the clinical data with biologic pathways data used for the integrated analysis of high-throughput experimental results. This will be done by integrating the clinical drug vocabularies by which drug therapies are recorded in clinical data. Additionally, they will integrate a small set of high-quality pathway network resources that contain models of the drug targets and affected pathways of the currently available drugs.     

Nationwide Health Information Network Trial Implementation (NHIN)

September 30, 2007 through January 23, 2010

Funding source: DHHS – Office of the National Coordinator

Regenstrief Institute is working with other state, regional and non-geographic health information exchange consortia to become components of the “network of networks” that is the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The consortia will cooperatively develop specifications for, and trial implementations of, the NHIN and test these trail implementations with each other to ensure that they can all work together to implement an interoperable “network of networks” built on top of the Internet.

OpenMRS: Open Medical Record System

March 16, 2008 through August 31, 2009

Funding source: Northrop Grumman Company (through Centers for Disease Control)

OpenMRS® is a community-developed, open-source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework. The community has come together to specifically respond to those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. The mission is to foster self-sustaining health information technology implementations in these environments through peer mentorship, proactive collaboration, and a code base that equals or surpasses proprietary equivalents.

Regenstrief Medical Informatics Research Fellowship

July 1, 1997 through June 30, 2002 and

July 1, 2002 through June 30, 2007 and

July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2012

Funding source: NIH – National Library of Medicine

This fellowship program is designed to prepare post-doctoral fellows for academic careers in medical informatics. Research fellows will obtain a broad array of general research skills, improve writing skills, learn the responsible conduct of research, and the structure content and design of medical information systems. Each fellow will be expected to gain competency in a modern programming language so that they can understand the strengths and limits of the systems with which they work.

Each fellow chooses to focus on one of the following three areas of enhancement: (1) high performance computing and communications, (2) health services research, or (3) cancer informatics. By the end of their second fellowship year, fellows will have performed a clinical epidemiologic project, designed and conducted a developmental research project, performed their own data analyses, and written papers to be submitted to peer-reviewed publications.

Testing Techniques to Radically Reduce Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, or MRSA)

August 1, 2008 through July 13, 2013

Funding source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Our long term goal is to reverse the trend of hospitals serving as sources of infection.  By creating learning collaboratives of front-line workers using lean-six sigma approaches to benchmark, identify, adapt and implement solutions, and continue to feedback performance, we can assure both initial and long-term success in systematically changing work processes.

Value of Health Information Exchange in Ambulatory Care

September 30, 2004 through September 29, 2009

Funding Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

We will refine an established economic model of health information exchange (HIE), create a "laboratory" in which we can test that model and, finally, test the model's predictions in a randomized controlled trial.  We will use an existing HIE (the Indiana Network for Patient Care) as the foundation for this project.  In addition, we have engaged several payers in this project in order to provide part of the data but also to lay the foundation for changes in reimbursement models based on the findings.