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Health Informatics research at UNC-Chapel Hill
Health Informatics research at UNC-Chapel Hill is characterized by close collaborations among faculty across multiple academic departments and professional schools. The health informatics research network on UNC campus also includes several interdisciplinary research and clinical centers and laboratories. Additional research opportunities are available through collaboration with other area universities, research organizations, healthcare networks and public heath agencies. Health Informatics research at UNC-Chapel Hill falls into the main areas below.
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Clinical Genomics
North Carolina Clinical Genomic Evaluation for NextGen Exome Sequencing (NCGENES) is a collaborative effort between RENCI, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and NC TraCS Biomedical core. It is aimed at creating a bioinformatics infrastructure and a systematic process for using whole exome sequencing (WES) as a tool in diagnosing disease, revealing genetic markers for disease, and helping people understand the relationship between their genotype and diseases they have or are at risk of developing.
Informatics for Genetic Sequencing is another collaborative project between RENCI and several UNC research and clinical care units: Department of Genetics, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Department of Epidemiology and Center for Bioinformatics. It is focused on developing data infrastructure to study genomes in order to better understand human health and disease, informing diagnoses and treatment prediction.
Population informatics
The Carolina Center for Health Informatics (CCHI) is a practice-based and research unit within Emergency Medicine. CCHI staff are involved in several different grants and oversee the continuing development and maintenance of the North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC DETECT) in collaboration with the NC Division of Public Health.
The Cancer Information & Population Health Resource (CIPHR) provides a prospective data linkage between metrics of cancer incidence, mortality, and burden in North Carolina and data sources at an individual and aggregate level that describe health care, economic, social, behavioral, and environmental patterns. The Cancer Information & Population Health Resource (CIPHR) program is a central component of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Outcomes Research Program. CIPHR incorporates a world class computing system, leveraging strengths in data resources, systems for data management and project tracking, and expert staff to support a broad range of research using these data and systems.
The Patient-Reported Outcomes Core (PROs) helps cancer outcomes researchers collect data directly from patients. PROs capture the patient perspective on disease and treatment, including the outcomes that impact patients’ day to day lives. PROs are widely used as endpoints in clinical trials to evaluate new treatments and interventions, and increasingly PROs are administered routinely in clinical care to track symptoms and functioning in a reliable and systematic way. PRO Core provides consultation regarding design and implementation of patient-reported data capture, at both the proposal and protocol writing phases of research.
Clinical & Health informatics
Clinical informatics interventions have been at the heart of UNC initiated programs that improve care through research and practical application. The primary care practices on campus have implemented diabetes registries utilizing point of care reminders that optimize on site care and population management techniques utilizing enhanced care teams that achieve chronic care outcomes that reach and exceed many national benchmarks. Similar programs in depression management and anti-coagulation management have also achieved these high standards. The clinical informatics push has not been limited to campus.
Through the NC Regional Extension center for Health Information Technology, an arm of the NC Area Health Education Centers Program, health information technology has been spread to nearly 4,000 providers across the state of North Carolina. NC AHEC Practice Support provides personalized, no cost assistance to primary care and behavioral health practices that accept NC Medicaid and are interested in optimizing health information technology. This support includes: electronic health record optimization, learning how to effectively manage clinical data registries, and implementing telehealth best practices. These outreach efforts have left UNC well positioned to partner with these practices for future research efforts including patient-centered outcomes research (led by the Sheps Center for Health Services Research), dissemination and translational research (supported by our CTSA organization, NC TRACS).
UNC is home to one of the 12 NIH-funded Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information Systems (PROMIS) research sites. UNC Site focuses on validation and linking of pediatric and adult PROMIS item banks for four pediatric chronic illnesses: asthma, cancer, nephrotic syndrome and sickle cell disease
The Center for Virtual Care Value and Equity (ViVE) is committed to building a robust coalition of internal and external resources, fostering collaborative research initiatives, and developing frameworks that enhance the equity and value of virtual care. The center aims to build and promote a productive coalition of internal and external resources, thought leaders, and stakeholder representatives to support virtual care research and provide access to virtual care data and expertise.
Providers’ engagement with patient safety and continuous improvement efforts are of most importance to healthcare organizations. Over the last decade, the Department of Radiation Oncology, Healthcare Engineering Division has led the development of models of individual transformation to safety mindfulness (or in other words, the individual engaging in proactive incident reporting and problem-solving; while maintaining overall wellness). Work in this area focuses on the implementation and assessment of improvement programs, methods, tools, and technology aimed at increasing safety mindfulness, and wellness of healthcare providers.
By developing a scalable platform for exploring and analyzing whole brain tissue cleared images, RENCI is working to help researchers take advantage of advances in microscopy to study brain development and disease. The Nuclei Ninja project will shed new light on the understanding of three dimensional structures of the whole brain by allowing researchers to localize and characterize individual brain cells. To reduce the need for manual annotation and speed scientists’ ability to gain insights from these images, RENCI is designing a semi-automated annotation software and crowd-sourcing platform for annotations that will generate high-quality training data for a 3D cell segmentation engine capable of annotating new microscopy images automatically.
HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is an emerging next generation standard framework for the exchange of electronic health record (EHR) data. The FHIR specification defines a common vocabulary and mechanism for sharing EHR data independent of how it is actually stored. All of the major EHR vendors are developing standardized FHIR interfaces for their clinical data. The objective of this project is to design, develop and evaluate a novel informatics platform known as FHIRCat that leverages Semantic Web technologies, FHIR models/profiles, and ontologies for effective standards-based data integration and distributed analytics, enabling high-quality reproducible clinical and translational research.
UNC’s Precision Health and AI Research Lab is a biostatistics research lab dedicated to the development of new algorithms and statistical methodology for data-driven decision making and their application across a wide variety of human health domains. With the guiding principle of producing statistical methods and strategies for advancing human health, members of this lab work on a wide spectrum of projects, from analyzing ways to tailor treatment strategies to heterogeneous populations to using deep learning to detect patterns in ECG signals.
Labs & Centers
Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC)
Carolina Center for Health Informatics
Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research
Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention (HPDP)
Communication for Health Applications and Interventions (CHAI Core)
General and Oral Health Center (GO Health Center)
Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center
North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute
Organizations and Conferences
