Accolades for DMICE

As regular readers of this blog know, I periodically devote postings in this blog to accolades, usually for myself but sometimes for others. I would like to devote this posting to accolades for the many students and faculty in the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE). More details are provided in the recently published edition of our department newsletter. (Past newsletters are also available.

There are many accolades to point out in the newsletter (starting on page in parentheses):

• Our new Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited clinical informatics fellowship has launched with its first two fellows (1)
• Thirty-seven individuals graduated with degrees and certificates in biomedical informatics from OHSU in the 2015 academic year (2)
• Faculty member Nicole Weiskopf, PhD receiving a Catalyst award from the Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute (OCTRI) (3)
• Numerous faculty and students participating in OHSU Research Week in May, 2015 (4)
• A surprise party celebrating 25 years at OHSU for myself and fellow faculty Mark Heland, MD (10)
• New OHSU School of Medicine leadership appointments for Paul Gorman, MD and Heidi Nelson, MD (15)

One final accolade is particularly noteworthy to call out. We were recently informed that OHSU informatics students will be finalists in the 2015 AMIA Student Design Challenge. The theme of this year’s competition is, The Human Side of Big Data – Facilitating Human-Data Interaction. A number of student groups from around the country submitted entries to the competition, and four finalists were recently selected to present at the AMIA Annual Symposium in November. Two of those finalist groups consist of OHSU students:

• Ashley Choi, Benjamin Cordier, Prerna Das, PhD, and Jason Li, MS will present on, “Take a Breather: Empowering Adherence & Patient Centered Research through Interactive Data Visualization, Social Engagement, & Gamification in Patients with Sleep Apnea.”
• Michelle Hribar, PhD, L. Nelson Sanchez-Pinto, MD, Kate Fultz Hollis, MS, Gene Ren, and Deborah Woodcock, MBA will present on, “Learning from the Data: Exploring a Hepatocellular Carcinoma Registry Using Visual Analytics to Improve Multidisciplinary Clinical Decision- Making.”

I am delighted that our students were successful enough to get this far, and I hope that one of them emerges as the winner, as a group of OHSU informatics students did in last year’s event.