Speaker Bio Information
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. FAAP
Bryan Vartabedian, M.D., FAAP is the Director of Community Medicine for the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology & Nutrition for Texas Children’s Hospital, America’s largest children’s hospital. He is a full-time faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine
Dr. Vartabedian is also the Director of Community Medicine for the division of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition. He has spent 20 years in full-time clinical practice and currently sees patients at Texas Children’s Hospital | The Woodlands. Passionate about communication and patient education, he is best known for his exam room ‘whiteboard sessions’ that are part of every evaluation. Summarizing patient treatment plans with bullet points, arrows and summary lists, his novel method has been written about and adopted in clinics far beyond Texas Children’s Hospital. Patients and parents routinely photograph his ‘works of art’ as a means of remembering what was discussed.
Dr. Vartabedian is passionate about the translation of medical information for parents. He is the author of Looking Out for Number Two – A Slightly Irreverent Guide to Poo, Gas and and Other Things That Come Out of Your Baby (HarperWave, 2017) and Colic Solved – The Essential Guide to Infant Reflux and the Care of Your Screaming, Difficult-to-Soothe Baby (Ballantine/Random House, 2007).
Originally from Boston, Massachusetts, Dr. Vartabedian has called Houston home since 1991. He is married and has two teenage children and one crazy Australian Labradoodle.
Dr. Edward H. Shortliffe, MD, PhD
Edward H Shortliffe, MD, PhD, MACP, FACMI is Chair Emeritus & Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is also Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics in the College of Health Solutions at Arizona State University and Adjunct Professor of Population Health Sciences (Health Informatics) at Weill Cornell Medical College. Previously he served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has also held academic appointments at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston and the University of Arizona. He chaired the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia (2000-2007), and the Section on Medical Informatics at Stanford University (1979-2000). A pioneer in the development of applications of artificial intelligence in medicine, including the first medical expert system (MYCIN), he has also spearheaded the formation and evolution of graduate degree programs in biomedical informatics at Stanford, Columbia, and ASU. Both a PhD informatics scientist and a physician who has practiced internal medicine, Dr. Shortliffe is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has also been elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the International Academy for Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). A Master of the American College of Physicians, he received the Association of Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1976 , ACMI’s Morris F. Collen Award in 2006, and IMIA’s François Grémy Award of Excellence in 2021. Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and editor of a well-known textbook on Biomedical Informatics (now in its fifth edition), Dr. Shortliffe has authored over 375 articles and books in the fields of biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence.
In August 2022, Dr. Shortliff will publish the textbook, “Intelligent Systems in Medicine and Health, The Role of AI” along with his co-authors Dr. Trevor Cohen and Dr. Vimla L Patel.
Presentation
Christoph U. Lehmann, MD, FAAP, FACMI, FIAHSI, is the Associate Dean for Clinical Informatics, Willis C. Maddrey, MD Distinguished Professor in Clinical Sciences, and Director, Clinical Informatics Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Dr. Lehmann is Professor for Pediatrics, Population and Data Sciences, and Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern where he directs the Clinical Informatics Center. He conceived and launched the journal Applied Medical Informatics, devoted to original research and commentary on the use of computer automation in the day-to-day practice of medicine and he served as the Editor-in-Chief since its inception. In 2009, he co-edited Pediatric Informatics, the first textbook on this subject.
Dr. Lehmann served on the board of the American Medical Informatics Association from 2008 to 2013 and served two terms as the organization’s secretary. In 2010, he was inducted as a fellow into the American College of Medical Informatics, in 2014 he was elected to the American Pediatric Society, and in 2012 he became a Vice President of the International Medical Informatics Association in charge of the IMIA Yearbook to serve as President from 2017-2019.
From 2010 to 2019, Dr. Lehmann was the inaugural Medical Director of the Child Health Informatics Center for the American Academy of Pediatrics, where he was involved in developing the Model Pediatric EHR Format and currently works on the CHILD Registry. Dr. Lehmann served on the federal Health IT Policy Committee and co-chaired the Health IT for the Care Continuum Task Force at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. He was the first chair of the Examination Committee of the American Board of Preventive Medicine, Subcommittee for Clinical Informatics until 2018. Dr. Lehmann’s research focuses on improving clinical information technology and clinical decision support. His most recent publications can be found here.
Panel Speakers
Dr. Ronald Peshock, M.D.
Ronald Peshock, M.D. is a Professor of Radiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Internal Medicine. He serves as the Radiology Department’s Vice Chair of Information Technology. His clinical interests include atherosclerosis, cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular imaging, and coronary computed tomography (CT) angiography.
Jennifer Roye, MSN, RN, CHSE, CNE
Jennifer Roye is the Assistant Dean for Simulation and Technology and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing and Health Innovation. She is lead faculty for the Fundamental Telehealth Skills course in the Health Informatics Certificate Program. Mrs. Roye received her MSN from UTA in 2003 and is currently enrolled at The University of Alabama in the EdD Instructional Leadership program. She practiced as a CPNP in private practice for 10 years and as an RN in the Emergency Department at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Ft. Worth, Texas for 16 years. Her areas of research interest include simulation, telehealth, student engagement, enhancing online education, health informatics, rural health, and moral distress in the undergraduate nursing student population.
Dr.Usha Sambamoorthi PhD
Dr. Sambamoorthi is a Professor of Pharmacotherapy, Associate Dean for Health Outcomes Research. Dr. Sambamoorthi received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Madras. She is a health economist, who has dedicated her teaching, mentoring, and research efforts to improving population health by reducing disparities by gender, race/ethnicity, age, disability, and mental health. To support her research, Dr. Sambamoorthi has consistently received funding from federal agencies such as AHRQ, NIH, and the Veteran Health Administration (VHA) – the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States. Her work has also been supported by private foundations and private corporations.
Dr. Sambamoorthi’s teaching areas focus on improving population health through examination of healthcare access, quality, and outcomes using “real-world” large data. Her interest in interdisciplinary perspectives has led to numerous collaborative research publications and grants with physician researchers, epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, nurses, sociologists, policy and behavioral researchers.
In recognition of her commitment to diversity, education, scholarship, and research, Dr. Sambamoorthi received the 2018 Women In Science and Health (WISH) Advanced Career Excellence Award from West Virginia University (WVU). Dr. Sambamoorthi’s mentorship skills are well known and she is often referred to as “Mentor Extraordinaire” by her mentees. Her mentees have included graduate students, post-docs, junior faculty, and clinicians from different health professions. She has received outstanding mentoring awards from the American Public Health Association (2010), WVU Vice President’s Award (2017), WVU Health Sciences (2017), and WVU Distinction in Graduate Research Mentoring award in 2020.
Dr. Sambamoorthi has over 230 collaborative publications in peer-reviewed high-impact journals. She uses diverse national and international databases (example: UK Biobank) for analysis and triangulation of research findings. Dr. Sambamoorthi has expertise in analyzing large national survey databases (NHIS, MEPS, BRFSS, NHANES, HRS, PSID and others), health insurance claims (Medicaid, Medicare – FFS and Advantage, Veteran Health Administration, and private insurance), and linked databases (SEER-Medicare, SEER-CAHPS, MCBS, Veteran Health Administration-Medicare) to answer timely healthcare delivery and policy questions. Dr. Sambamoorthi routinely applies advanced statistical and econometric techniques in her analysis of large data.
Dr. Mari Frances Tietze, PhD, RN-BC, FHIMSS, FAAN
Dr. Mari Tietze is the recipient of the Myrna R. Pickard Endowed Professorship at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) College of Nursing and Health Innovation (CONHI). In that role, she is also the Affiliate, representing nursing, to the UTA Multi-Interprofessional Center for Health Informatics (MICHI), a collaboration among numerous health informaticists. She is also the director of the graduate certificate and Master’s in Nursing (MSN) Health Informatics at UTA CONHI.
Dr. Tietze’s contributions over the past 30 years, have been based on a combination of interprofessional informatics and telehealth technology. For interprofessional informatics, she implemented one of the first bedside computer systems in the U.S. using barcode-based medication administration and a team of nurses, pharmacists, and information systems professionals. More recently in 2016 and in 2020, Dr. Tietze was co-investigator in two Texas-wide multi-method studies to examine over 1,000 nurses’ experiences using their electronic health records (EHRs). Dr. Tietze is co-author of the AJN Book of the Year, Nursing Informatics for the Advanced Practice Nurse: Patient Safety, Quality, Outcomes, and Interprofessionalism. She has been a long-standing member of the Technology Informatics Guiding Education Reform (TIGER) global initiative, working on harmonization of informatics competencies.
Dr. Tietze received her BSN from Washburn University, her MSN from Kansas University, and her PhD from Texas Woman’s University College of Nursing. She is a Fellow of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and is certified in nursing informatics from the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Dr. Tietze is a Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing.
Focus Abstract Presenters
Dr. John Robert Bautista, RN, MPH, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on using a sociotechnical lens in examining the use of new and emerging technologies (e.g., smartphones, social media, blockchain, and artificial intelligence) for health-related purposes. His current research uses a sociotechnical lens to generate design and implementation solutions that could make clinical-AI teamwork to be effective, efficient, and ethical. He completed his PhD in Information and Communication Science at Nanyang Technological University. He holds a BS Nursing (Cum Laude) from Trinity University of Asia and a Master of Public Health from the University of the Philippines – Manila. He has published in leading health informatics journals, such as JAMIA, JAMIA Open, ACI Open, and IJMI.
Dr. Jenny Weon grew up in Houston, TX and moved north to do her undergraduate training in Austin, TX in the Business Honors Program and Supply Chain Management at the McCombs School of Business. She then moved further north to Dallas, TX to earn her combined MD/PhD degrees at UT Southwestern through the Medical Scientist Training Program before completing a residency in anatomic pathology (chief resident 2021-2022). She is currently a clinical informatics fellow at UT Southwestern and is planning on also completing a neuropathology fellowship. She has prior informatics-related project experience in coordinating multidisciplinary teams to design and increase accessibility of informational guides for pathology-related services through their incorporation into the electronic health record, assisting with data curation for predictive modeling for iron deficiency anemia, and vendor selection and evaluation for laboratory courier services software. Her current interests are in increasing efficiency of operational workflows and data analytics.
Ana Aleksandric is a third-year Ph.D. student in Security and Privacy, and a graduate research assistant in Health Informatics under the supervision of Dr. Nilizadeh and Dr. Wilson. In Fall 2021 and Spring 2022, she served as a HIMSS TIGER Scholar Intern where she worked on many health informatics-related projects under the supervision of subject matter experts. In addition, Student Computing Research Festival (SCRF) took place in Spring 2022 where she presented our publication named Your Tweets Matter: How Social Media Sentiments Associate with COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the US which won the award for the Best Ph.D. Lightning Talk. Furthermore, she obtained her undergraduate degree in computer science at Texas Wesleyan University where she also held the IT Help Desk Student Assistant position. While attending Texas Wesleyan University, she received two awards for the Outstanding Computer Science Student as well as the honor of being a student on the Dean’s list every semester. She is proud to mention that she was a part of the Texas Wesleyan Table Tennis varsity team, the National Table Tennis champion in both women’s and men’s categories in the past 10 years (and more)
Henry Anderson is a data scientist at UT Arlington, working on the University Analytics group, where he works to serve the institutional data and analytical needs of the campus. His work focuses on applying machine learning, predictive modeling, and natural language processing to UTA’s data to support institutional decision makers, faculty, staff, and student support personnel. He has been an active participant in the Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining fields, where his research has focused on building predictive models of student success and auditing them for algorithmic bias. As of 2022, he has begun participating in public health informatics research alongside Dr. Gabriela Wilson, Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh, and Ana Aleksandric. Since 2018, he has helped teach natural language processing to undergraduate students as part of UTA’s Globalization, Internationalization, Localization, and Translation (GILT) program.
Dr. Shakera Moreland, also known as “The HIM Concierge” earned her B.S. degree in Health Informatics and MBA with a concentration in Healthcare Management from Western Governors University in 2012 and 2014, respectively. In addition, Shakera completed her doctoral coursework in Health Sciences with a concentration in Leadership and Organizational Behavior at A. T. Still University in 2020.
One of her passions is exploring how the advancement of technology can be used to improve provider satisfaction while also creating tools to develop the next generation of health information and informatics professionals.
She currently serves as a member of the THIA Workforce Development Group and a plethora of academic advisory boards and institutions from around the country.
The range of experience that Dr. Moreland from the front end to the back end within health information management gives her a unique perspective into how the application of AI/ML could help improve patient outcomes, improve patient and provider satisfaction, and lead to an optimized revenue cycle.
Lightning Talk Abstract Presenters
Dr. Jawahar Jagarapu is an assistant professor of pediatrics in the Neonatology division at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in biomedical informatics at UT School of biomedical informatics, Houston. He graduated from Andhra Medical College in South India followed by pediatric training in the United Kingdom with extensive work experience in National Health Service in the UK. He further pursued his interest in neonatology by completing a residency in pediatrics at Driscoll Children’s Hospital and fellowship training at the University of Miami. Dr. Jagarapu has extensive experience in diverse health systems in three countries. He is board-certified in pediatrics and neonatal-perinatal medicine.
Dr.Jagarapu is a digital health enthusiast. He is interested in telemedicine, informatics, and artificial intelligence in healthcare. He believes telemedicine and artificial intelligence will play a significant role in enhancing newborn and pediatric care in the future. He is actively involved in various teleneonatology initiatives at Children’s Health, Dallas, which aim to improve newborn care in north Texas. Dr. Jagarapu’s research interests include studying applications of telehealth in neonatal care, especially telehealth’s impact on improving access to quality care and enhancing family-centered care and clinical outcomes.
Christian Lee is a current first-year student at the Texas Christian University School of Medicine. Prior to medical school, he completed a MSc thesis in cancer genomics at the University of Toronto. His research focused on multi-omics data integration and mutation rate variability. Now, Christian aims to further combine his interest in data analytics and computational tools with his medical education and career. He currently conducts research under the supervision of Dr. Eric Chou at Baylor Scott & White All Saints Medical Center and will work at Memorial Sloan Kettering this summer as a data engineer. Outside interests include web development, violin, and sports.
Dr. Shirin Nilizadeh is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of Texas at Arlington. She received her Ph.D. in Security Informatics from the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). For her dissertation on Privacy-aware Decentralized Architectures for Socially Networked Systems, she received a two-year fellowship from the School of Informatics and Computing at IUB. Following her doctorate, she held post-doctoral positions in CNets at IUB from 2014-2015, in SecLab at the University of California Santa Barbara from 2015-2017, and then in CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University from 2017-2018. Her research focuses on security and privacy in the context of systems and social networks using techniques from machine learning and big data analytics.
Dr. Estefanie Garduno is originally from Mexico City where she attended medical school at Westhill University and the National Institute of Fine Arts. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Health Informatics at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at UT Southwestern where she works as a research project manager for the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She is a member of the student and early career editorial board for Applied Clinical Informatics the official e-journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA). Estefanie’s goal is to consistently improve patients’ quality of life through optimization of health care processes. Therefore, she has participated in multiple global healthcare projects in which her interventions have been judged as innovative and appealing. As an artist and a woman advocate, Estefanie founded: “Women in Art” at UTSW, a group dedicated to empowering women through art to promote creative thinking that leads to concrete outcomes. Her illustrations have been seen in advertisements and children’s books and her surrealist-anatomical artwork has been displayed at multiple art venues.
Paul Murdock is currently a medical student at the TCU School of Medicine in Fort Worth, TX. He has a master of science from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Applied Health Sciences Informatics. He is a graduate from the University of Cincinnati, where he received a bachelor of science in Medical Sciences and a minor in Psychology. Paul plans to use to his degrees to become a physician scientist. He also strives to become a well-rounded learner, researcher, and citizen while in medical school.
Poster Abstract Presenters
Dr. John Hanna, is a first-year Clinical Informatics fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern and a trainee member of the Clinical Informatics Center. After he completed an internal medicine residency at Rochester General Hospital, NY in 2020, he joined the University of Texas Southwestern for an Infectious Diseases fellowship that he completed in 2022. During the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, he helped with developing an exploratory local regional COVID-19 registry at Rochester Regional Health that recognized syncope as a presenting symptom for COVID-19 and was the seed for a pragmatic ambi-directional observation of the relationship between cycle threshold values and severe COVID-19 infection. During his Infectious Diseases fellowship, his research focused on the use of social media in healthcare, the effects of COVID-19 among people with HIV, healthcare-associated infections among COVID-19 patients, and the predictors of murine typhus in North Texas. His interests under the informatics umbrella fall under public health informatics, consumer health informatics, population health, and using clinical decision support and data analytics tools to serve antimicrobial stewardship and epidemiology.
Dr. Saket Girota is an interventional cardiologist and a health services researcher. He is passionate about improving quality of care and outcomes for patients with cardiovascular and peripheral artery disease. He is also the Director of Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at Iowa City Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center. With funding support from National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs Health Services Research & Development (HSRD), he has developed a vibrant outcomes research program that is focused on cardiac and peripheral vascular disease. A central theme of my research has been to understand the determinants of variation in quality of care across hospitals with the goal of identifying best practices. He is also deeply interested in evaluating diffusion of new technology into healthcare practice and use comparative effectiveness research to quantify the benefit and risks associated with new treatments. His research work has led to several first and senior author publications in prominent journals – NEJM, JAMA, JAMA-Internal Medicine, Circulation, and JACC. He is also the Immediate Past Chair and a member of the Clinical Working Group of the American Heart Association Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation task force, and a member of the research and publications committee for the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) and the Cath PCI registry
He is previously led a multi-center collaboration that was funded by VA HSRD pilot grant to develop and validate a novel application using natural language processing (NLP) to extract ankle brachial index (ABI) from clinical reports in the Veterans Health Administration. Our NLP tool has demonstrated a high level of accuracy and can be used for identification of PAD within the VHA. His goal is build on his team’s ongoing work to address important questions regarding the long-term survival and clinical outcomes in PAD patients and evaluate the impact of PAD treatments on these outcomes.
Dr. Mark Mann, Ph.D., Ed.D., Associate Professor in the School of Health Promotion and Kinesiology at Texas Woman’s University is also the coordinator for the Sport and Health Studies Informatics tracks at TWU. Mann has conducted research with computer game simulation environments that were designed to have students participate in simulation games and stay motivated until mastery was achieved. One recent project was the modification of a game called ELM-Maze into a new game called ELM-Downhill Skier. The modified game consisted of the game player being able to adeptly manipulate the skier down the five distinct mountain runs in as short a period of time as possible. All of the runs on the downhill course were modified and were designed with the idea of progressing in difficulty from one stage of the game to another with intermittent breaks between the most difficult sections. Categories investigated were: Concentration, Goal Clarity, Feedback, Challenge, Autonomy, Immersion, Social Interaction, and Knowledge Improvement. A similar study more relevant to this conference was the creation of a web application using artificial intelligence to facilitate learning mastery in a web based curriculum called the Adaptive Navigation Support Technique of Link Hiding. Data collected was used to evaluate the effectiveness of using AI to help participants navigate through an instructional website and not get “lost in hyperspace.” . The results of the study demonstrated statistical significance between the control group (no AI) and the experimental group (yes AI)
Carolina Ramirez-Tamayo is a Management Engineer with leadership attitude, teamwork, proactivity, honesty, and a sense of belonging that are seen in the dairy actuary. Pursuing an MSc. in Advanced Manufacturing & Enterprise Engineering at UTSA, while being part of the Advanced Data Engineering lab, developing machine and deep learning algorithms for several fields of knowledge such as healthcare (Radiology) and energy. Knowledge in Natural Language Processing due to an internship in Addiction Resources Systems, inc. Teaching assistant of Engineering Analysis at UTSA.