Irvine, Calif., Feb. 15, 2022— The University of California, Irvine today announced the launch of the Institute for Precision Health, an endeavor that marries UCI’s powerhouse health sciences, engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, clinical genomics and data science capabilities to deliver the most effective health and wellness strategy for each individual person and, in doing so, confronts the linked challenges of health equity and the high cost of care.
The institute will bring a multifaceted, integrated approach to what many call the next great advancement in healthcare. Precision medicine collects patient data – history, exams, demographics, molecular and diagnostic tests – and uses the power of computer algorithms, predictive modeling and AI to develop personalized treatment and lifelong health maintenance plans.
“What we’re doing at the Institute for Precision Health is perhaps the most important step we’ll take in this generation to improve health and well-being, ” said Steve A.N. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., FAAP, UCI’s vice chancellor for health affairs. “The ever-evolving capabilities of the IPH herald a future of personally tailored care that fundamentally alters the healthcare landscape to place the patient at the center and in control.
David Nathan Wong
“In the past, individuals were treated based on approaches thought to be best for groups of patients. Now we begin the IPH epoch of patient-centric care designed to continuously improve the health of the individual within their community, even as new knowledge accrues, whereby rights, incentives, transparency and control remain the purview of the patient, ” Goldstein added.
Because the disciplines included in IPH already existed at UCI, Goldstein noted, it was in many ways only a small step to join them together and build a resource across campus. The synergy created, however, is no small matter. “This is
Giant leap for healthcare. It’s glaringly clear that precision health is how to increase the quality of care, to decrease the cost of care – by both improving how it’s delivered and matching cost to value – and to deliver quality healthcare to the underserved, ” he said, adding that the institute’s success will be measured by improvements in individual and community health.
Informatics Professor Kai Zheng Helps Uci Leverage Health Data
A major goal is revealing new approaches to tackle ailments that lack successful therapies. “For many diseases – especially neurodegenerative ones like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and even Huntington’s, where the causal gene is known – there are simply no treatments available that change their course. We’re excited because we know that with precision health, we have the potential to define diseases better, understand them better and treat them far better, ” said Thompson, IPH co-director. “We expect major breakthroughs.”
While the vision idea for IPH has long been in the works, the COVID-19 pandemic was a beta test demonstrating how rapidly critical medical needs could be addressed. In early 2020, with elements of IPH in place, UCI clinicians, biomedical and computer scientists, and public health experts joined forces to create an AI-driven tool to assess the critical care needs of COVID patients. This app-based tool, the COVID Vulnerability Index, demonstrated that a data-driven approach coupled with world-class clinical therapeutics could help yield the best outcomes for individuals.
“We couldn’t have had a ‘proof of concept’ with higher stakes than the pandemic, ” said Tom Andriola, IPH co-director. “We saw in real time how mobilizing our capabilities to analyze health data and make customized decisions could complement leading-edge clinical treatments to save lives and reduce hospital stays.”
The Power Of Health Informatics
“Additionally, there is an explosion of data in healthcare, and we’re still only using a small fraction in decision-making, ” he added. “IPH is including not only data from traditional healthcare settings but also the data coming from a new generation of empowered health consumers who are tracking and managing their own health journey.”
The plan is for IPH to have a brick-and-mortar home on the UCI campus that will serve as a hub for educating data-informed clinicians to practice at the top of their licenses, a site for the infrastructure to facilitate translational research, a place for community outreach and a venue for commercial collaborations. Already, industry leaders such asSyntropyandMITREand community partners such as Children’s Health of Orange County and the VA Long Beach Healthcare System are working with IPH to leverage UCI’s capabilities and commitment as a fair broker for health data, placing individuals first.
“For patients, the message is that UCI’s Institute for Precision Health is the future of your care and well-being, ” Goldstein said. “For the research community, IPH is a wide-open opportunity for discoveries that matter. For the business community, IPH is ready to partner to advance new, cost-effective care. And for the philanthropic community – the folks who are determined to change the world – this is it. This is your chance.”Informatics is the key enabler for all research and translational activities. It is also at the center of innovations that transform the ways in which biomedical data are collected, shared, and analyzed, leading toward new frontiers of research and discoveries.
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Since its founding, has placed informatics at the forefront of its research and results in translation endeavors. Established in 2008 as an integral part of the original , our Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI) spearheads informatics work within and coordinates synergistic activities across the UC Irvine campus. The core mission of the CBMI is “to provide and innovate informatics solutions to facilitate clinical research, accelerate results translation, and engender the transformation of hospitals and clinics into a learning health system, both locally and across CTSA Hubs.”
At the CBMI, we strive to build a research-facilitating informatics infrastructure by deploying and harmonizing state-of-the-art software systems and adopting best practices. We created, and will continue to grow, a dedicated translational informatics team that not only serves routine functions, but also excels in conducting cutting-edge original research in biomedical informatics. We have also assembled a strong informatics leadership team with broad representation of key stakeholders from our medical center and across campus, to ensure seamless integration of our translational informatics work with clinical IT operation; and buy-ins from experts in relevant disciplines such as information and computer sciences. Above all, we work diligently with our end users—researchers, healthcare practitioners, patients, families, and communities—to make sure our informatics tools and services are optimally used to achieve a true impact on advancing the science of translational research.
The leadership team of CBMI consists of nationally renowned scholars in biomedical informatics and IT leaders at UC Irvine Health, silos that are often difficult to connect. This purposeful organizational strategy has created a multidisciplinary group of key stakeholders that have a track record both in conducting cutting-edge scholarly work to advance clinical and translational science, and in providing state-of-the-art informatics support for research.
Uc Irvine Donald Bren School Of Information And Computer Sciences Employees, Location, Alumni
The Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMI) supports and accelerates ’ mission by providing essential informatics methods, infrastructure, and services to researchers, clinicians, and patients at UC Irvine, at our partner institutions, and across the CTSA Network. Over the past ten years, the CBMI has grown from a supporting unit into an engine of transformation that powers a full range of research, education, results translation, and community engagement activities. By drawing upon the outstanding pool of talent from UC Irvine’s top-ranked schools and programs (e.g., the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering), CBMI serves a critical concierge role of connecting health sciences researchers with expertise in emerging domains of -omics analysis, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing.
Infrastructure, Tools, & Services: The CBMI manages a wide array of informatics applications to support clinical and transitional research activities at our Hub. These include enterprise systems such as OnCore (Forte Research Systems, Inc. Madison, WI) and Freezerworks (Dataworks Development, Inc., Mountlake Terrace, WA); and commonly used tools such as REDCap for electronic data capture; Tableau for data visualization and analysis; and i2b2 for cohort discovery. We also provides a HIPAA-compliant research data environment called myResearch Portal, built using the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology.
Since 2011, we have had an enterprise-wide Clinical and Research Data Warehouse (CRDW) that serves the dual purpose of quality improvement and clinical and translational research. The CRDW constitutes the backbone of our enterprise data analytics service. It also fuels several cross-institutional research data networks of which we are part, such as NCATS Accruals to Clinical Trials (ACT) and the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet). With the CRDW, we created an Honest Broker mechanism for furnishing de-identified patient-level EHR data to authorized users with proper IRB approval. Our Honest Brokers are professionally trained business intelligence analysts versed with working with researchers to develop complex SQL queries.
Ph.d. Collaboration With Uc Irvine Advances Computational Science
Networked Collaborations: As part of the University of California Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development (UC BRAID) collaborative, CBMI led the implementation of the i2b2/SHRINE-based UC Research Exchange (UCReX) network to enable cohort discovery across the 5 UC medical campuses. We are also working with UCSD on the patient-centered SCAlable National Network for Effectiveness Research (pSCANNER), one of the 34 research data networks that comprise PCORnet. pSCANNER utilizes a distributed architecture that builds upon the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM).
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