Browsing by Author "Lehmann, Harold P."

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    Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the nation’s public health information systems infrastructure: synthesis of discussions from the 2022 ACMI Symposium
    (Oxford University Press, 2023-05-05) Acharya, Jessica C.; Staes, Catherine; Allen, Katie S.; Hartsell, Joel; Cullen, Theresa A.; Lenert, Leslie; Rucker, Donald W.; Lehmann, Harold P.; Dixon, Brian E.; Health Policy and Management, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health
    Objective: The annual American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) symposium focused discussion on the national public health information systems (PHIS) infrastructure to support public health goals. The objective of this article is to present the strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities (SWOT) identified by public health and informatics leaders in attendance. Materials and methods: The Symposium provided a venue for experts in biomedical informatics and public health to brainstorm, identify, and discuss top PHIS challenges. Two conceptual frameworks, SWOT and the Informatics Stack, guided discussion and were used to organize factors and themes identified through a qualitative approach. Results: A total of 57 unique factors related to the current PHIS were identified, including 9 strengths, 22 weaknesses, 14 opportunities, and 14 threats, which were consolidated into 22 themes according to the Stack. Most themes (68%) clustered at the top of the Stack. Three overarching opportunities were especially prominent: (1) addressing the needs for sustainable funding, (2) leveraging existing infrastructure and processes for information exchange and system development that meets public health goals, and (3) preparing the public health workforce to benefit from available resources. Discussion: The PHIS is unarguably overdue for a strategically designed, technology-enabled, information infrastructure for delivering day-to-day essential public health services and to respond effectively to public health emergencies. Conclusion: Most of the themes identified concerned context, people, and processes rather than technical elements. We recommend that public health leadership consider the possible actions and leverage informatics expertise as we collectively prepare for the future.
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    The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment
    (Oxford University Press, 2021) Haendel, Melissa A.; Chute, Christopher G.; Bennett, Tellen D.; Eichmann, David A.; Guinney, Justin; Kibbe, Warren A.; Payne, Philip R. O.; Pfaff, Emily R.; Robinson, Peter N.; Saltz, Joel H.; Spratt, Heidi; Suver, Christine; Wilbanks, John; Wilcox, Adam B.; Williams, Andrew E.; Wu, Chunlei; Blacketer, Clair; Bradford, Robert L.; Cimino, James J.; Clark, Marshall; Colmenares, Evan W.; Francis, Patricia A.; Gabriel, Davera; Graves, Alexis; Hemadri, Raju; Hong, Stephanie S.; Hripscak, George; Jiao, Dazhi; Klann, Jeffrey G.; Kostka, Kristin; Lee, Adam M.; Lehmann, Harold P.; Lingrey, Lora; Miller, Robert T.; Morris, Michele; Murphy, Shawn N.; Natarajan, Karthik; Palchuk, Matvey B.; Sheikh, Usman; Solbrig, Harold; Visweswaran, Shyam; Walden, Anita; Walters, Kellie M.; Weber, Griffin M.; Zhang, Xiaohan Tanner; Zhu, Richard L.; Amor, Benjamin; Girvin, Andrew T.; Manna, Amin; Qureshi, Nabeel; Kurilla, Michael G.; Michael, Sam G.; Portilla, Lili M.; Rutter, Joni L.; Austin, Christopher P.; Gersing, Ken R.; Biomedical Engineering and Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
    Objective: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successful with large-scale data beyond what is available in any given organization. Here, we introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), an open science community focused on analyzing patient-level data from many centers. Materials and methods: The Clinical and Translational Science Award Program and scientific community created N3C to overcome technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers to sharing and harmonizing individual-level clinical data. We developed solutions to extract, aggregate, and harmonize data across organizations and data models, and created a secure data enclave to enable efficient, transparent, and reproducible collaborative analytics. Results: Organized in inclusive workstreams, we created legal agreements and governance for organizations and researchers; data extraction scripts to identify and ingest positive, negative, and possible COVID-19 cases; a data quality assurance and harmonization pipeline to create a single harmonized dataset; population of the secure data enclave with data, machine learning, and statistical analytics tools; dissemination mechanisms; and a synthetic data pilot to democratize data access. Conclusions: The N3C has demonstrated that a multisite collaborative learning health network can overcome barriers to rapidly build a scalable infrastructure incorporating multiorganizational clinical data for COVID-19 analytics. We expect this effort to save lives by enabling rapid collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and data scientists to identify treatments and specialized care and thereby reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19.