Lecture 72: What is Health Informatics, and how it can be leveraged to propel healthcare in emerging markets?

When: Thursday May 8, 2014 – 7:30 PM
Where: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanity Building (HU), Conference Room 009 (Get Directions, Campus Map )

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Speaker: Hadi Kharrazi, MHI, MD, PhD
Language: English

Synopsis:

Health Informatics (HI) is a growing field in which medicine, nursing, and public health intersect with computing, information sciences, and management. The main focus of HI is to collect, aggregate, analyze and translate data efficiently and effectively into improved population health outcome, better patient experience, and lower healthcare cost. HI includes various research/applied subdomains such as bioinformatics, clinical informatics, imaging informatics, and population/public health informatics, although the increasing overlap among these subdomains is blurring these distinctive definitions. HI experts often have a mix of interdisciplinary backgrounds ranging from health sciences to technological sciences.
This presentation will provide a brief overview of fundamentals of HI and cover some recent advancements of HI in both developed and developing countries. The review of essential concepts of HI will discuss items such as electronic health records, personal health records, health information exchanges, and insurance claims. The discussion of recent advancements of HI will include mHealth applications and biometrics. The presentation will continue by focusing on how some of the HI solutions can be adapted from advanced settings and translated to emerging settings while potentially providing similar health outcomes. Within this translational context, a number of hypothetical case studies and potential applications will be discussed with the audience. The presentation will end with a number of suggested HI ‘next steps’ that can be operationalized in select resource-moderate settings.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Hadi Kharrazi is the assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is the assistant director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT (CPHIT) and serves on the Public Health Informatics Working Group Executive Committee of the American Medical Informatics Association (PHI-WG AMIA).
Dr. Kharrazi’s primary research interest is in contextualizing clinical decision support (CDS) in population health informatics (PHI) platforms to be utilized at different HIT levels of managed care such as electronic health records (EHRs) or consumer health informatics (CHI) solutions. In line with this contextualization, he has modified and regenerated electronic quality measures (eQM), based on PHI-derived CDS systems, and applied it to large and multi-institutional clinical datasets to represent a population aspect of the health quality measurements.
As the assistant director of CPHIT, Dr.Kharrazi is pursuing priority PHI research interests that provide direct population-based applications to providers, patients, and payers. Aligned with CPHIT activities, Dr. Kharrazi has automated the PHI-CDS process by implementing guideline-derived CDS rules against large health information exchange (HIE) datasets that contain a diverse set of population data. In the near future, he is planning to closely collaborate with Maryland’s HIE, also known as CRISP, to generate new population-based decision support frameworks such as cross-provider readmission risk predictive models and comparative NQF-derived eQMs.

Fee (including dinner): $5 Students, $15 Public

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