Department of Computer Science

[REU Seminar] The Role of Informatics in Healthcare: A Primer

Friday, June 11, 2021

1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

The Role of Informatics in Healthcare: A Primer

Siraj Anwar
Senior Vice President, Chief Health Informatics Officer, Harris Health System.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, UT Health, School of Biomedical Informatics.
Voluntary Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Houston, College of Medicine, Department of Clinical Sciences

Location

Online via Zoom

Abstract

This talk will focus on the key operating principles of informatics and the role that they play in healthcare. It will cover important aspects of clinical stakeholder engagement in the change management process, how to leverage data to identify and confirm problems, performing technical feasibility of clinical IT applications, testing and validation, implementation and then ultimately performing an evaluation to determine success or failure. These are all key steps to appropriately implementing IT into the clinical workflows and will be illustrated with the help of real-world examples.

About the Speaker

Siraj obtained his medical degree from the University of Mysore, India and worked as a primary care physician before pursuing a full-time career in informatics. He currently serves as the Chief Health Informatics Officer at Harris Health System, which is the 4th largest safety net health system in the United States. In this role, he leads the informatics and data science operations for the health system. Siraj is passionate about leveraging information technology, data and human relationships to provide patient care that has high quality and high reliability and has been doing this since 2001.