Clinical Informatics Lecture Series

 VR in Medicine, with Mark Zhang DO, MMSc, FAMIA

Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS
featuring: Mark Zhang DO, MMSc, FAMIA

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Brennan Spiegel, MD, MSHS, is director of Health Services Research for Cedars-Sinai, Director, Graduate Program in Health Systems, and the George and Dorothy Gourrich Chair in Digital Health Ethics. He directs the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CS-CORE), a multidisciplinary team that investigates how digital health technologies, including wearable biosensors, smartphone applications, virtual reality (VR) and social media, can strengthen the patient-doctor bond, improve outcomes and save money. CS-CORE unites clinicians, computer scientists, engineers, statisticians and health services researchers to invent, test and implement digital innovations, always focusing on the value of technology to patients and their providers. His team developed one of largest and most widely-documented medical VR programs at Cedars-Sinai, and his work has helped to support a new field of medicine called Medical Extended Reality, or "MXR," in which doctors use immersive technologies like VR to help treat conditions ranging from pain, to anxiety and depression, to irritable bowel syndrome. 

Spiegel has published numerous best-selling medical textbooks, editorials and more than 270 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He is listed in the Onalytica "Top 100 Influencer" lists for digital health and virtual reality. His digital health research has been featured by major media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, CBS News, Forbes, Huffington Post, LA Times, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Spiegel published the book "VRx: How Immersive Therapeutics Will Revolutionize Medicine" (Basic Books, NY, NY), which was named by Wired Magazine as one of its top 8 science books of 2020. Beyond his focus on digital health innovations, Spiegel conducts psychometric, health-economic, epidemiologic and qualitative research across a wide range of healthcare topics. His research team has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Hearst Foundation, State of California Precision Medicine Program, PCORI, Veterans Administration and industry sources. Spiegel is the immediate past editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology, the leading clinical gastroenterology journal in North America. He was among the first group of clinical researchers to examine the gastrointestinal manifestations of COVID-19. He continues to practice clinical medicine and maintains an academic teaching practice at Cedars-Sinai. A prolific speaker, Spiegel is frequently invited to present on his areas of expertise at national and international events.

Dr. Spiegel earned his bachelor's degree from Tufts University, his medical degree from New York Medical College where he received Alpha Omega Alpha honors, and his master's from the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai and his fellowship at UCLA Medical Center. He is also the Founding Director of the Cedars-Sinai Master of Science in Health Systems Program, where he teaches classes on digital health science, health analytics, and cost-effectiveness analysis.

 Bradley H. Crotty, MD, MPH, FACP, FAMIA, Vice President, Chief Digital Officer Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin Health Network
Associate Professor Medical College of Wisconsin

Bradley H. Crotty, MD, MPH, FACP, FAMIA
 

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Dr. Brad Crotty serves as the Chief Digital Officer for The Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin Health System, responsible for leading the digital transformation work the network which covers 11 acute care hospitals and over 40 health centers. He oversees digital services and digital transformation across the system, including new digital-first care model development. In addition to his leadership role in the clinical enterprise, he serves as the interim President for Inception Health, a company formed in 2015 by Froedtert & the Medical College to accelerate digital health transformation, partner and lead investments in promising external organizations, and to develop and build innovative scalable solutions for patients and those who care for them. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and board certified in internal medicine and clinical informatics.

Clinical Informatics Through the Decades: What We've Learned and How We Work Now

Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI

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Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and serves as the director of the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC).

He has led NIH, AHRQ and ONC-funded projects on clinical problem lists, malfunctions in clinical decision support systems, approaches for sharing clinical decision support nationally, and adverse event detection using machine learning. Dr. Wright has authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal publications and more than 150 additional publications, including abstracts, presentations at scientific meetings, books, and book chapters. He is also a committed teacher, directing and lecturing in local, national, and international courses on biomedical informatics, and teaching medical students and graduate students in biomedical informatics.

Dr. Wright directs clinical decision support operations at VUMC, and previously served as clinical lead for clinical decision support and clinical informatics at MassGeneral Brigham in Boston.  He is active nationally, serving as a board member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), an Associate Editor for Applied Clinical Informatics and an Editorial Board Member for Methods of Information in Medicine. Dr. Wright is also a founding member and director of research for the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative.

Dr. Wright's work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the American Medical Informatics Association New Investigator Award (2010), election to the American College of Medical Informatics (2015), the Early Career Achievement Award from Oregon Health and Science University (2016), election to the inaugural class of the Fellowship of the American Medical Informatics Association (2018), and election to the International Academy of Health Science Informatics (2019). In 2023, he received the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from AMIA.

A decade of clinical informatics fellowship training: how far we've come and where we're going

Jonathan Hron, MD

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Dr. Hron attended medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and completed his residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center. He continued on as a Chief Resident at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he began practicing Clinical Informatics. As a faculty member he has devoted his career to improving systems of care through the implementation of information technology, including electronic health records, HIPAA compliant text communication systems, telehealth and artificial intelligence. He is a staunch advocate for data driven decision making in clinical informatics as well as the secondary use of clinical data for research and quality improvement. In 2015 he co-founded the Boston Children’s Hospital Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program, one of the first ACGME approved pediatric Clinical Informatics training programs in the country. Clinically, Dr. Hron cares for hospitalized patients on the general pediatrics and complex care services at Boston Children's.

10 Years of the HCILS: A Conversation with Dr. Zak Kohane

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD

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Join us for a conversation with Dr. Isaac (Zak) Kohane, as we kick off the 10th year of the Harvard Clinical Informatics Lecture Series

Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, whose mission is to develop the methods, tools, and infrastructure required for a new generation of scientists and care providers to move biomedicine rapidly forward by taking advantage of the insight and precision offered by big data. Kohane develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, from whole health care systems to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment. He also has worked on AI applications in medicine since the 1990’s, including automated ventilator control, pediatric growth monitoring, detection of domestic abuse, diagnosing autism from multimodal data and most recently assisting clinicians using whole genome sequence and clinical histories to diagnose rare or unknown disease patients. He is the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of NEJM AI and co-author of a recent book “The AI Revolution in Medicine". He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American College of Medical Informatics.