The Division of Clinical Informatics (DCI) was among the first academic divisions in the world to concentrate on the use of computers for patient care, teaching, and medical research. The goals of DCI have been to improve the quality and reduce the cost of medical care, to enhance the quality of medical education, to enhance the relationship between doctor and patient, and to explore innovative approaches to research through computing. Our faculty has developed hospital-wide clinical computing systems at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Our faculty were the very first to engage patients in direct dialogue with computers, and have been building and evolving clinical decision support systems for four decades. Today, DCI faculty continues to lead the evolution and study of personal health technologies, web-based clinical computing systems, national health systems, and international comparative approaches. Our faculty is driven to find solutions to real-world problems.
See our DCI Publications list that spans five decades!
Visit our Faculty pages to learn more about their research.
Research Areas
Anesthesia Informatics - David M Feinstein
Artificial Intelligence - Leo Celi, Steven Horng
Biomedical Discovery Infrastructure - Leo Celi, Steven Horng, Alexa McCray, Charles Safran, Manu Tandon
Biostatistics - Roger Davis
Clinical Decision Making - Steven Horng, Charles Safran
Clinical Systems Analysis - Meghan Dierks
Emergency Medicine Informatics - Steven Horng, Evan L Leventhal, Terrance Lee, Larry Nathanson
Global Health Informatics - Leo Celi, Yuri Quintana, Larry Nathanson
Healthcare Management - Meghan Dierks, Stan Finkelstein, Charles Safran, Manu Tandon
Learning Health Systems - Yuri Quintana
Patient-Centered Health - Alexa McCray, Yuri Quintana
Pathology Informatics - Ramy Arnaout
Mental Health Informatics - John Torous, Yuri Quintana
Mobile Health Systems -Seth Berkowitz, Yuri Quintana, John Torous
Radiology Informatics - Seth Berkowitz
Projects:
Alicanto
Yuri Quintana leads the Alicanto platform (http://www.alicantocloud.com) that supports health professionals' online collaborations to develop and disseminate standardized care pathways and have online virtual tumor boards. Alicanto has online meeting spaces, private groups with shared documents, online discussion forums, and a clinical case consultation system. Alicanto is being used by several Harvard affiliated hospitals in pediatrics and cancer. Learn more about Alicanto.
Artificial Intelligence
Steven Horng is Clinical Lead, Machine Learning, Center for Healthcare Delivery Science at BIDMC and collaborates on MIT AI researchers. See his work on AI and Sepsis and AI and COVID-19 Forecasting.
BIDMC @ Home
Seth Berkowitz lead a multidisciplinary effort to build and deploy BIDMC@home, a revolutionary mobile application that engages patients in their own health care and extends the continuity of care beyond the bounds of the hospital and physicians' office. See details here.
InfoSAGE
Yuri Quintana leads the InfoSAGE platform, Information Sharing Across Generations, (https://www.infosagehealth.org) is a federally funded research project that aims to study the information needs of elders and their adult children who are involved in their care by building a “living laboratory”. InfoSAGE allows us to study real-life situations of elders and the challenges that families face in communicating, coordinating, and collaborating with complex and costly care environments. Learn more about InfoSAGE.
Leveraging electronic health records and medical claims to repurpose drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer and Covid-19
In a project led by MIT professors Roy Welsch and Stan Finkelstein, researchers will use statistics, machine learning, and simulated clinical drug trials to find and test already-approved drugs as potential therapeutics against Covid-19. Researchers will sift through millions of electronic health records and medical claims for signals indicating that drugs used to fight chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and gastric influx might also work against Covid-19 and other diseases.
Pathology Informatics
Ramy Arnaout laboratory uses computational biology, mathematics, physics, and engineering to understand complex systems in biology, genomics, and medicine, with a focus on high-throughput immune repertoire genomic sequencing (systems biology of the immune system) and big data clinical data analytics. See more at http://arnaoutlab.org.
Undiagnosed Diseases Network
Alexa McCray currently serves as a Principal Investigator of the US-wide Undiagnosed Diseases Network, an NIH research study that seeks to provide answers for patients and families affected by undiagnosed conditions.