Bio

After receiving an Aerospace Engineering degree from MIT, and undergoing post-doctoral training in Medical Informatics and Clinical Research at Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, I joined Indiana University in 2001. Since then I have become a close collaborator with national and international public health stakeholders to advance the technical infrastructure and data-sharing capabilities. I served as a member of World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center for the Design, Application, and Research of Medical Information Systems, where I provided consultancy on issues related to health information system identity management; and implementing automated patient record matching strategies. In my role as Chief Architect for OpenHIE, I served a global health collaborative supporting eHealth planning and implementation needs for developing countries. I’ve built and studied automated regional electronic laboratory reporting systems that demonstrate substantial increases in the electronic capture rates for diseases of public health significance when compared to traditional, manual, paper-based procedures. I oversee the evaluation of operational standards-based laboratory data interfaces between public health clinical laboratories and an electronic clinical messaging application used by both public health officials and clinicians. As co-chair of the U.S. Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) Population Health technical work group, I helped lead development of technical interoperability specifications for nationally recognized public health IT use cases. I received the American Medical Informatics Association's (AMIA) Martin Epstein Award for advancing the body of medical informatics knowledge through novel record linkage methods; I've provided expert testimony before the DHHS National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) regarding national patient identity management policy; I have worked with the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, and the CDC as a subject matter expert developing new approaches, policies, and procedures for identity management; and I have received AHRQ R01 funding to develop methodological improvements for real-world patient matching systems. 

Research Interests:

My recent research focuses on developing and testing large-scale HIE-based solutions in support of population health and public health informatics; integrating clinical and social determinants of health (SDH) to identify at-risk patients in need of SDH services; developing and testing novel patient matching methods; and leveraging machine learning-based models to improve discovery and decision support in a variety of contexts.

Publications