Dental Public Health and Dental Informatics in the Era of Big Data
Bruce Dye, DDS, MPH
After graduating from the Ohio State University College of Dentistry, CAPT Bruce Dye began his USPHS career assigned to the Indian Health Service. He later completed an MPH at the University of Michigan, epidemiology training at Johns Hopkins University, and a dental public health residency at NIDCR.
Health Informatics: Where We Are Now and What Could Be Next
Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, FACP, FACMI
Doug Fridsma is the President and Chief Executive Officer of The American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Fridsma is well-known in the informatics and healthcare community as an expert in informatics, interoperability, standards, and health IT (including meaningful use). His understanding of the science and application of informatics and experience as practitioner and policymaker give him a depth of knowledge well-suited to the critical challenge of transforming health and health care. Prior to joining AMIA, Dr. Fridsma was the Chief Science Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, responsible for the portfolio of technical resources needed to support the meaningful use program and health information technology interoperability. He was engaged in key initiatives involving the Federal Health Architecture; the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund (PCOR-TF) and the Standards and Implementation Framework.
BigMouth: A Multi-Institutional Dental Data Repository
Muhammed Walji, PhD
Muhammad Walji is the Associate Dean for Technology Services and Informatics and Professor of Diagnostic and Biomedical Sciences at the UTHealth Houston, School of Dentistry. Muhammad’s research uses informatics approaches to improve the safety and quality of oral healthcare, with a particular focus on electronic health records. He currently serves as a PI of two NIH/NIDCR funded studies on patient safety systems and dental quality measures. He also serves as a PI on an AHRQ funded study regarding adverse events. He has provided informatics expertise in the development and maintenance of the Dental Diagnostic System (DDS) and also leads a multi-institutional team that has developed the BigMouth Dental Data Repository. As Associate Dean for Technology Services and Informatics he also leads the Clinical IT groups that are responsible for implementing and supporting the EHR in the School of Dentistry clinics.
Integration of Behavioral Health Measures into Electronic Health Records
Thankam Thyvalikakath, DMD, MDS, PhD
Dr. Thyvalikakath is Director of Dental Informatics Core at the Indiana University School of Dentistry and Research Scientist at the Center for Biomedical Informatics, Regenstrief Institute. As core director, she is creating a program to enhance patient care through improved data capture and retrieval to assess treatment outcomes. Her research established foundational knowledge on applying user-centered design and cognitive engineering methods to design and evaluate clinical systems in dentistry. Currently, she is leading a study supported through the National Dental Practice-based Research Network of the NIDCR to explore the feasibility of mining electronic dental records data from Network practices to assess treatment outcomes. She is also co-investigator on a recent NIDCR funded study to implement clinical decision support for tobacco cessation in dental practices. Dr. Thyvalikakath also participates in clinical teaching and practice at the IU School of Dentistry.
Clinical Informatics Medicine Subspecialty: History and Current Status
Denece O. Kesler, MD, MPH
Dr. Denece Kesler is a Board Director for the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), holding that position since 2009. She recently ended nine years on the American Board of Preventive Medicine, of which she was Chair and President for four years. She also served for six years on the ABMS Committee on Certification (COCERT), leading the last two years of her term as Committee Chair. In these positions, she played different and significant roles in moving Clinical Informatics forward to become a Subspecialty within medicine. She is also a Professor at the University of New Mexico, Health Sciences Center, Department of Internal Medicine where she is the Program Director for the Public Health and General Preventive Medicine Residency program and the Director of the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health Promotion (COEHP).
Health Data Standards and Open Science Activities at the National Library of Medicine
Kin Wah Fung, MD
Kin-Wah Fung, MD, MS, MA, FRCSEd is a research scientist at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. He led the planning and implementation of clinical information systems in 14 Hong Kong public hospitals serving over five million patients. Dr. Fung’s main focus of research and development at NLM is medical terminologies, with the goal of promoting their adoption in the electronic health record. He has developed the CORE Problem List Subset of SNOMED CT and RxTerms, which are widely used both in clinical systems and research settings. He also spearheads the development of maps between clinical terminologies and administrative classifications to facilitate system interoperability and data re-use. He serves on advisory groups at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation.
Keynote Presentation: Planning of the Next Generation of Electronic Health Records
James Cimino, MD
Dr. James Cimino is a board certified internist and clinical informatician, currently a Professor of Medicine and inaugural Director of the Informatics Institute at the University of Alabama-Birmingham School of Medicine. He has been carrying out clinical informatics research for over 30 years with principle research areas in desiderata for controlled terminologies, mobile and Web-based clinical information systems for clinicians and patients, context-aware form of clinical decision support called “infobuttons”, and clinical research data repositories. Past appointments include a Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Columbia University and Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development at the NIH Clinical Center and the National Library of Medicine. His honors include Fellowships of the American College of Physicians, the New York Academy of Medicine and the American College of Medical Informatics (Past President), the Priscilla Mayden Award from the University of Utah, the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the President’s Award, both from the American Medical Informatics Association, the Medal of Honor from New York Medical College, the NIH Clinical Center Director’s Award (twice), and induction into the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine).
The Role of Informatics in Public Health Activities
Miguel Torres-Urquidy, DDS, MS, PhD (candidate)
Dr. Miguel Torres-Urquidy is a Senior Service Fellow with the Division of Health Informatics and Surveillance of CDC. He currently supports the Medical Countermeasure Tracking System and manages the public web-release of information for the National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System. Before joining CDC, he worked as post-doctoral associate at the Center for Dental Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he conducted NIH funded research focused on diagnostic terminologies. Dr. Torres-Urquidy was trained as a dentist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and continued his education with a Master’s degree in Biomedical Informatics from the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He is past chair of the Dental Informatics working group at the American Medical Informatics Association. He also published the book “Medical and Dental Data Integration” with Springer-Verlag.
Transforming BIG DATA into Actionable Knowledge
Natalia Chalmers, DDS, PhD
Dr. Chalmers is the Director of Analytics and Publication with the DentaQuest Institute, previously serving as a Pediatric Dentist Clinical Research Fellow at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She earned her Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from the Medical University of Sofia, and a Ph.D. and a certificate in Pediatric Dentistry from the University Of Maryland School Of Dentistry, as well as a Masters in Clinical Research from Duke Medical University. She is a board-certified pediatric dentist and Diplomate of the American Board of Pediatric Dentistry. Dr. Chalmers serves in leadership positions with the Pediatric Oral Health Research and Policy Center, the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry Council on Scientific Affairs, the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, and the International Association of Dental Research Women in Science Network.
Keynote Presentation: Big Data: How Data Can Guide the Scientific Decision-Making Process
Heiko Spallek, DMD PhD
Professor Heiko Spallek serves as Pro-Dean at The University of Sydney, Faculty of Dentistry. Prior to joining the Faculty, Professor Spallek served as Associate Dean at the University of Pittsburgh’s dental school. In 1993, he graduated from the School of Dentistry, Humboldt University Berlin where he continued his career and was appointed in the Department of Periodontology and also received his PhD in the field of dental material sciences. While being appointed at Temple University School of Dentistry in Philadelphia, he earned an MSBA with a concentration in Computer and Information Science in 2000. Professor Spallek’s research has as its focus the development of computerized clinical decision support tools—he published more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and a textbook for Dental Informatics. He serves as chief investigator of an NIH-supported research project that conducts a large clinical trial in the US and as co-investigator for several funded research projects. He serves as the representative of the American Association for Dental Research on the American Dental Association’s Standards Committee on Dental Informatics (SCDI). Dr. Spallek is councilor of the Dental Informatics Section of the American Dental Education Association.