Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School
Accelerating medicine and empowering patients
The HMS Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) is tackling one of the most crucial and currently largely unmet needs in the modern health care system: integrating, interpreting, and acting upon the complex data generated during biomedical research and the practice of medicine.
By transforming large biomedical data sets into pragmatic, computational technologies in areas like genomics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, DBMI is defining the future of precision medicine and impacting human health in ways unimaginable only a few years ago.
My optimism that automated tools will improve patient care has grown stronger every year since I completed my medical training. Today I am proud to be joined by some of the world’s most creative and ambitious faculty, postdocs, students, and collaborators who are not only improving data aggregation and measurement limitations, but building the analytic tools necessary to help leverage that data to solve some of the most confounding health challenges of our time.
Learn more about DBMI’s mission and vision
DBMI's academic programs and courses, including our Entrepreneurs Salon and Medical AI Bootcamp, address informatics educational gaps and meet students where they are in pursuit of developing a lifelong appreciation for automation – not unlike what happened to me when I was in their shoes. Many of our faculty have gravitated to our department because of a shared mission, which is driving some of our newest projects and broad research initiatives. Whether it is developing machine learning to find therapeutics for rare diseases, enabling patients to share computable versions of their own personal medical records to advance their own care, or identifying cancer pathology in brain tissue intra-operatively, DBMI researchers are at the vanguard of accelerating biomedicine by focusing on the intersection of computational methods, basic biology, and clinical practice.
Learn more about DBMI’s educational programs
The key to transforming clinical care is recognizing it as a knowledge-processing discipline. Our greatest challenge—and opportunity—is to begin treating health care systems as living laboratories to drive research and, ultimately, improve the quality of life for patients and their families. DBMI is here to equip our future leaders with the quantitative approaches and tools to help reach that reality.
Isaac Kohane
Founding Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics
