Health IT Experts to Meet and Discuss Industry's Latest Research, Advances

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 15, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Experts representing the likes of IBM Watson Health and the Food and Drug Administration will join researchers from such institutions as Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins University for the seventh annual Workshop on Health IT and Economics (WHITE) on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 21-22, 2016, at The Westin Georgetown in Washington, D.C.  The participants will present and discuss the latest findings and practices connected to information technology making healthcare more patient-centered, effective and cost-efficient.

The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business hosts the conference (8 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday including an evening reception and 8 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday), which is open to the public. Register at http://go.umd.edu/WHITE2016registration. Early-registration rates apply through Tuesday, Sept. 20. Onsite registration is available until capacity is reached.

This year's forum will signal health IT research is reaching a turning point, say WHITE organizers. "I believe we are approaching an inflection point in regard to leveraging data and technology to improve healthcare practice and delivery, says WHITE Chair Ritu Agarwal, CHIDS founding director, Robert H. Smith Dean's Chair of Information Systems and senior associate dean at Smith. "Today, when we combine the increasingly large amounts of digitized medical data with state-of-the-art analytical methods, we have unprecedented opportunities to improve health outcomes and reduce costs."

Research sessions will involve experts from leading academic institutions such as University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, Cornell University, Oregon Health & Sciences University, and more than two dozen other research institutions; government agencies such as the FDA and ONC; healthcare policy and practice organizations such as AcademyHealth and Brookings Institution; and industry leaders such as Tenet Healthcare and Optum Labs. The participants will present their latest findings in areas including:

• Machine learning in healthcare
• How health IT affects provider behavior
• Healthcare quality information
• Predictive analytics
• Mobile health
• EHR and HIE
• Online provider reputation and competition

"WHITE provides a great venue to facilitate the interactions among academia, policymakers, and practitioners," says WHITE program co-chair Guodong (Gordon) Gao, CHIDS co-director. "The research presentations and panel discussions will surely stimulate new ideas to unleash the power of technology that will lead the nation to a new level of patient engagement, quality transparency, and care delivery." 

Keynote speakers and plenary panelists (full bios here) for the workshop include:

• Anil Jain, senior vice president and chief medical officer, Explorys and Watson Health, IBM
• Lisa Simpson, president and CEO of AcademyHealth
• Richard Frank, Margaret T. Morris Professor of Health Economics, Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School
• Pete Celano, director of consumer health initiatives, MedStar Institute for Innovation
• Joseph Tonning, medical officer, Data Mining and Informatics Evaluation and Research Team, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• Anuj Desai, vice president of market development, New York eHealth Collaborative
• Spencer Jones, director of data science, Tenet Healthcare Corporation 
• Marc Paradis, vice president, Data Science University at Optum Labs

The conference also will include awards presented for Best paper, Best student-authored paper and Young researcher.

WHITE is offering a limited number of patient and provider scholarships for attending the conference. Interested patients or clinical providers can inquire about the scholarships via [email protected]

WHITE is partially supported by a grant from the United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

About CHIDS
The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) is an academic research center based in the Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technology (DO&IT) at the Robert H. Smith School of Business that collaborates closely with industry, government, and other key health system stakeholders. CHIDS' research seeks to understand how digital technologies can be more effectively deployed to address outcomes such as patient safety, healthcare quality, efficiency in healthcare delivery, and a reduction in health disparities. CHIDS offers the benefit of renowned scholars in healthcare analytics, technology innovation, adoption, implementation, and design. The pool of talent, knowledge and expertise in DO&IT is acknowledged by several publications as a top-5 performer in research production worldwide; the Information Systems group is ranked in the top-10 worldwide by BusinessWeek and U.S. News and World Report. CHIDS pioneers in the study of digitally enabled health system transformation and is widely known for its thought leadership and research collaborations.

Media Contacts: 

Kenyon Crowley, WHITE director and CHIDS deputy director 
[email protected] 
301-405-9593

Greg Muraski 
[email protected] 
301-892-0973

SOURCE University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business