AeHIN: April HI Research Seminar

The Health Informatics Research Seminar will take place on Thursday, April 16th at 12:00 PM via Zoom. Leo Anthony Celi, MD, MS, MPH, will be giving a talk on “Data Sharing in the Era of COVID-19.”  

Abstract: The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues to test the capacity of world health systems. We have since learned about COVID-19, the infection from SARS-CoV-2, the way medicine always has clinical presentations, course, and management strategies have been shared by anecdote or small case series. While we use modern technology to communicate, never before has our failure to build robust data-sharing systems in healthcare been more obvious. In the era of the electronic health record, physiologic, laboratory, imaging, decision making, and treatment data are continuously recorded. Inferences drawn from these data can inform epidemiological inquiries and guide treatment protocols where clinical trial data does not exist,or might be too slow to inform a rapidly evolving situation. While trials accrue, live treatment data accumulates, siloed within hospital systems. When considering COVID-19, the insight we could glean from a pooled, publicly available dataset analyzed by researchers in academics, startups, and industry alike, is both invaluable and necessary. Though our world has embraced data monetization, regulatory hurdles, funding apparatuses, and a publish-or-perish academia at the expense of open data sharing, our shortsightedness need not be our undoing. An unprecedented worldwide black-swan event deserves an appropriate response, and this begins with an unprecedented joining of forces – and data – to best understand our foe, and the successes and failures we have found in treatment thus far. 

As clinical research director and principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology (LCP), and as a practicing intensive care unit (ICU) physician at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Leo brings together clinicians and data scientists to support research using data routinely collected in the process of care. His group built and maintains the publicly-available Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) database and the Philips-MIT eICU Collaborative Research Database, with more than 12,000 users from around the world. MIMIC-III has been cited more than 500 times since 2016. In addition, Leo is one of the course directors for HST.936 – global health informatics to improve quality of care, and HST.953 – collaborative data science in medicine, both at MIT. He is an editor of the textbook for each course, both released under an open access license. "Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records" has been downloaded more than 500,000 times, and has been translated to Mandarin. Finally, Leo has spoken in more than 35 countries across 6 continents about the value of data and learning in health systems.

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https://weillcornell.zoom.us/j/140502099