University of Colorado Medical Campus Adds Chief Informatics Research Officer
The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Colo., has joined the increasing number of academic medical centers that are hiring chief research informatics officers (CRIO) to strategize and coordinate informatics governance, infrastructure, data management, and data-driven analytics.
Melissa Haendel, Ph.D., has been named CU Anschutz’s first CRIO, responsible for transforming the campus use of information and information systems to accelerate biomedical discoveries, streamline health system operations, and continuously improve patient care. The university said she would be a key partner for centers and hospital partners on the campus, accelerating research and translating those discoveries to improvements in care.
Haendel is joining CU from Oregon Health & Science University, where she leads the Translational and Integrative Sciences Laboratory and is a professor of medical informatics and clinical epidemiology. She also serves as the director of the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H, a National Institutes of Health program that works to improve collaborative analytics across 60 Clinical and Translational Science Award Institutes, including the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI). The CD2H is focused on national data sharing, cloud and information architecture, and clinical data interoperability.
During the pandemic, the CD2H led the effort to create a centralized, anonymous database of health records from people who tested positive for COVID-19, the National COVID Cohort Collaborative Data (N3C). The N3C is critical to understanding why some people get sicker than others, how the disease interacts with conditions like cancer or asthma, and whether treatments are effective. “Institutions that have invested in their informatics infrastructure, expertise, training, and data governance experience greater efficiencies, innovations, financial outlooks, and importantly, improved care and patient outcomes,” Haendel said, in a statement. “At the Anschutz Medical Campus, we have an excellent opportunity to work together to make a difference for patients, learners, researchers, and the entire biomedical community. Collaboration is key to realizing the promise of precision medicine, to deploying new models for training health professionals, and to achieving global research prominence.”
Tellen Bennett, M.D., director of informatics at the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, plays a leadership role in N3C. “Dr. Haendel is a brilliant informaticist, a strategic leader, and a gifted coalition-builder,” he said in a statement. “She led the amazingly rapid development of N3C, which is now the largest existing EHR data resource. It is poised to address ongoing challenges, such as long COVID.”
In his State of the School address in 2020, John J. Reilly, Jr., M.D., dean of the School of Medicine and vice chancellor for health affairs, outlined a plan to boost the quality of data analytics on the Anschutz Medical Campus. “It does not make any sense to have made the investments in all these new technologies and new science on the campus … and not be able to process the data with state-of-the-art techniques,” Reilly said in a statement. “We’re going to have to start recruiting people, both a workforce to meet the service needs as well as people who have the capacity to grow into thought leaders and developers in these fields, and that will be a primary focus for us in the years ahead.”
Since then, the School has added Casey Greene, Ph.D., as director of the Center for Health Artificial Intelligence, and Sean Davis, M.D., Ph.D., a 13-year veteran of the National Cancer Institute, to serve as associate director for informatics and data science at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.
