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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded four new National Centers for Biomedical Computing, two of which will be based at BWH. The Centers’charge is to develop and implement the core of a universal computing infrastructure that is urgently needed to speed progress in biomedical research. This will be done by creating innovative software programs and other tools that enable the biomedical community to integrate, analyze, model, stimulate and share data on human health and disease.
The two BWH centers, as part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, include the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing, led by Ron Kikinis, MD, and the Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside, led by Zak Kohane, MD, PhD and John Glaser, Partners chief information officer. Kikinis will lead his designated center as a multi-institutional effort to develop software programs that integrate analysis and imaging data from a variety of sources, including MRI scans, to better understand a broad range of human diseases. Kohane and Glaser will work to develop computational tools that enable clinical researchers to capitalize on the gains of the genomic revolution to understand the basic biology of diseases such as diabetes, neurological disorders and high blood pressure.
“These centers and projects will have a very significant impact on the form of our systems and the systems of organizations across the globe,” said Glaser. “The lessons learned from this research will change our understanding of the most effective ways to design and implement clinical information systems.”
In addition, BWH also received three other NIH grants, collectively totaling over $4 million. The focus of these grants will be a statewide implementation of electronic health records, improving safety and quality with outpatient order entry, and evaluating smart forms and quality dashboards in an electronic health record.
“Our investigators, faced stiff competition for these grants and the quality of our proposals, and the promise of our work is very clear,” Glaser added.