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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
University Of Pittsburgh Establishes Center For Biomedical Informatics, Which Receives $1.9 Million Federal Grant
PITTSBURGH, June 20 -- Reliance on advanced computerized systems is becoming commonplace in medical institutions that hope to use information to deliver health care, conduct research and educate students as efficiently and productively as possible. The University of Pittsburgh's recently established Center for Biomedical Informatics anticipates and addresses these needs and fosters collaborative work among faculty on Pitt's campus and increasingly throughout the metropolitan region.
"Information technology can improve patient care directly by accelerating access to a patient's complete clinical records, by providing patient profiles that suggest an appropriate diagnosis or course of therapy, by enabling patients to consult with their physicians on-line and in many other ways," said Charles P. Friedman, Ph.D., director of the Center and professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "Patients benefit indirectly from advanced information technology that educates physicians and allows scientists to conduct biomedical research more effectively. Information systems also allow researchers to evaluate current therapies and procedures to determine their worth."
In May, the Center received a 5-year, $1.9 million grant from the National Library of Medicine to continue support of the Pittsburgh Medical Informatics Training Program. The program provides training in six areas: decision support and medical artificial intelligence; computational biology; high performance computing, medical multimedia and telecommunications; education, information and cognition; health services research and evaluation; and dental informatics.
Faculty expertise and area resources make the Center's training program in biomedical informatics a leader in the country, according to Dr. Friedman. "This is important because there is a shortage of highly qualified persons in medical computing. It will allow us, in Pittsburgh, to grow our own talented professionals, who are essential to developing our new information systems and to maintaining the systems we have."
In addition to training, the Center promotes affiliations and collaborative activities among those interested in developing information systems to support health care, education, research and administration. It also offers financial support for selected projects and develops and tests innovative uses of computers in medicine and related fields. There are 570 affiliates, primarily faculty and students from Pitt, but also from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and other organizations throughout the region.
The training program is directed by Dr. Friedman, Gregory F. Cooper, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine who is with the Center, and Bruce G. Buchanan, Ph.D., professor in Pitt's department of computer science. The new grant extends support of the training program, which was established in 1987, and maintains Pitt as one of 12 federally funded sites. The funding runs through 2002 and will support 11 training positions. The dental informatics component is run in cooperation with Temple University School of Medicine.
Dr. Friedman and a student at the Center, William R. Hogan, M.D., recently were recognized with national awards for their contributions to this field at the 1996 meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Friedman presented a paper comparing hypertext, the way information is organized in the World Wide Web, with more traditional (so-called Boolean) ways of accessing medical information to identify possible infectious agents in clinical cases. Dr. Hogan's paper illustrated some of the problems that can occur when clinicians enter patient data in coded form along with written comments.
In 1995, Michael M. Wagner, M.D., Ph.D., then a student, now an assistant professor of medicine who is with the Center, also won a national award at the same meeting for his work conducted with Dr. Cooper. This research demonstrated that medical computer systems that advise clinicians can "learn" to improve their advice based on feedback from clinicians who use the system.
"Studies such as these are important examples of the research that is necessary to conduct in biomedical informatics if we are to create the best computer systems for retrieving information and improving patient care," said Dr. Friedman.
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