Dallas-based UT Southwestern Medical Center is expanding the scope of its Clinical Informatics Center, including integrating into research and educational programs at the new Peter O’Donnell Jr. School of Public Health, which plans to welcome its first students next year.
The new public health school, which received a $100 million gift from the O’Donnell Foundation, will advance public health through research and by meeting the need for an expanded public health workforce. The school will launch its Master of Public Health program in the fall of 2023, followed by doctoral degree programs the following year.
Informatics researchers can help apply analytics and modeling techniques that can be used to predict the progression of illness, complications, readmissions, and outliers in the cost of care for large-scale studies such as the longitudinal Dallas Heart Study (now known as the Dallas Hearts and Minds Study); to assess cardiovascular disease risk among diverse populations; to improve cancer screening in large health systems, especially among the underserved; and to study the impact of COVID-19 across communities.
UTSW’s Clinical Informatics Center was established in 2019 to facilitate collaboration, mentoring, and networking opportunities to develop, implement, and evaluate clinical informatics solutions for healthcare providers, as well as train practitioners in the field. Led by Christoph Lehmann, M.D., who was recruited to UT Southwestern to guide the efforts, the CIC has grown to include seven members and about two dozen affiliated faculty. It has launched a monthly colloquium that provides health information technology updates, and welcomed the first students to a new Master of Science in Health Informatics program. The CIC is also is a founding member of the Texas Health Informatics Alliance.
“As a healthcare system, we generate data as a by-product of patient care. These data can be leveraged to develop innovations for the healthcare system which can be applied in the clinical setting and measured. That is what clinical informatics does,” said Lehmann in a statement. He was recently appointed inaugural Associate Dean of Clinical Informatics. “We are starting to go beyond just the development of machine-learning models and actively working on implementing these models using the appropriate care, ethical considerations, and human oversight. We want our clinicians to benefit from our insights and enable them to better take care of their patients,” added Lehmann, who holds the Willis C. Maddrey, M.D. Distinguished Professorship in Clinical Science.
In a statement, Eric Peterson, M.D., M.P.H., vice provost and senior associate dean for clinical research, said UT Southwestern has made significant strides in clinical informatics in a short time frame across the institution. “Under Dr. Lehmann’s leadership, the Clinical Informatics Center quickly became known for innovative research in clinical informatics and related domains, the Master of Science in Health Informatics was developed and launched, and a new fellowship program started this summer. “In his new role, Dr. Lehmann supports investigators to leverage the electronic health record and other data sources for research and helps propel UT Southwestern to become a national model for data democratization and innovative interventions.”
