 | | | The Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute serves as home to the Northwestern University Biomedical Informatics Center (NUBIC). This new center brings together biomedical informatics researchers and clinical informatics leaders from Northwestern University, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Children’s Memorial Medical Center, Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Northwestern Memorial Hospital into an organization to coordinate biomedical informatics across the NU academic medical enterprise. The Center's operations committee consists of a director, an associate director, plus four program directors. - Provide biomedical informatics leadership, governance and coordination through NUBIC to leverage and extend Northwestern’s IT infrastructure and research;
- Share clinical information from NU’s clinical partners in a secure, private and safe environment, consistent with informed consent, and appropriate institutional review, through the development of an Enterprise-wide Data Warehouse;
Provide basic scientists and clinical and translational researchers access to a centralized computational infrastructure and database and software development expertise; and Train the medical and research staff, medical students, fellows and residents and next generation of biomedical informatics researchers and users through existing and newly developed programs.
 | NUBIC Director is Rex L. Chisholm, PhD, Adam and Richard T. Lind professor of Medical Genetics and director of the Center for Genetic Medicine. Dr. Chisholm coordinates all biomedical informatics activities throughout the greater academic medical enterprise, chairs the Biomedical Informatics Steering Committee, and supervises educational programs. | NUBIC Associate Director: Warren A. Kibbe, PhD, director of Bioinformatics for the Center for Genetic Medicine and the NU Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center is responsible for the NUBIC computational infrastructure and clinical trials management system. Dr. Kibbe is active in the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) Clinical Trial Management Systems Workspace, principal investigator (PI) of the Patient Study Calendar module, the Tissue Banks and Pathology Tools Workspace, the Integrative Cancer Research Workspace, and the Architecture Cross-cutting workspace. in addition, he is PI of the Northwestern component of the NCI-funded cancer Adverse Event Reporting System project (caAERS). He is a key participant in building a computable research representation of clinical data through his work with the Northwestern Clinical Enterprise Data Warehouse, and the caBIG Clinical Annotations Engine, a computable representation of pathology reports from electronic health records (EHRs). Dr. Kibbe's group developed and operates NOTIS, the clinical trial information management system used by NUgene and NU’s Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. | Medical Informatics Program Co-Director: David Liebovitz, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Chief Medical Information Officer at both NMFF and NMH, has for the past 5 years been the physician leader charged with implementing and optimizing inpatient online order entry and online physician documentation. He has integrated operational IT efforts with research projects including AHRQ funded medication reconciliation efforts and created a prioritization approach for quality and research based reporting needs. Dr. Liebovitz is a program director of the Masters in Medical Informatics Program and a member of AMIA and HIMSS. | Medical Informatics Program Co-Director: Abel Kho, MD, assistant professor of medicine, was a National Library of Medicine medical informatics fellow at the Regenstrief Institute with Dr. C.J. McDonald. His research spans informatics from data warehousing to clinical decision support. He created a very successful computerized reminder system to improve isolation rates at Wishard Hospital. With the Department of Geography, he characterized nosocomial infection spread within the hospital using a geographic information system to document nurses' aides roles in the spread of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus infections. Dr. Kho is principal investigator on an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality-funded grant to create a citywide electronic infection control network and has worked with Practice Based Research Networks to create an electronic data collection tool. This tool facilitates the identification of research patients at outpatient visits. His research also involves data mining of large datasets, such as analysis of over 100,000 inpatient admissions to determine which elements of the commonly ordered complete blood count predict increased mortality in hospitalized patients. Dr. Kho is also an instructor for the Masters of Medical Informatics program. | Imaging Informatics Program, Director: David S. Channin, MD, associate professor of radiology and chief of imaging informatics, leads development of tools to support use of clinical and research images and the mining of image meta-data and annotations. This Division is the primary liaison to the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) working groups, the Integrating the Health Enterprise (IHE) initiative and the caBIG Imaging Workspace. One of the first technical programmers on the GenBank project, Channin completed a residency program in diagnostic radiology including a year of radiologic computing research. He is the principal technical architect of the picture archive and communication system (PACS) at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. A member of the Radiological Society of North America, he serves on its Electronic Communications Committee, where he was a founding member of the IHE Strategic Development Committee. He is also a member of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) and the Society of Computer Applications in Radiology and on the editorial board of The Journal of Digital Imaging. Dr. Channin is a funded subject matter expert for the caBIG Imaging Workspace tasked to develop ontologies to support image annotations and the RadLex lexicon project as well as related software tools. He also founded the Masters of Medical Informatics program at the NU School of Continuing Studies. | | Public Health Informatics Program, Director: Chiang-Ching (Spencer) Huang, PhD, assistant professor of preventive medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine, coordinates informatics for population-based studies and public dissemination of research findings to promote public health awareness. This division provides a common infrastructure to reduce the burden of database development and maintenance, to maximize connections between different epidemiological studies, and to enable use of medical records for monitoring of emerging infections, potential bioterrorism, and foci of environmental toxins. | Bioinformatics Program, Director: Marcelo B. Soares, PhD, Rachelle and Mark Gordon professor of Cancer Biology and Epigenomics, director of the Cancer Biology and Epigenomics Program at the Children’s Memorial Research Center, scientific director of the Falk Brain Tumor Center at Children’s Memorial Medical Center and professor of pediatrics, is responsible for “omics”-based informatics. This division's primary goal is providing common infrastructure, interoperability and integration of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, epigenomic, genetic variation and clinical data. |
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