Information Systems in Healthcare, Clinical and Translational Research

When: Friday, November 1, 2013
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Prof. Uma Ramamurthy, Baylor College of Medicine

Host: Prof. Shishir Shah

Information systems play a crucial role in medical research and healthcare.  Along with providing the corporate computing infrastructure of email, networking and HR/payroll systems, there is a significant place for information technology in the research domain which impacts education and patient care.  There are several challenges in automating and setting up paperless infrastructure in this domain including effective user interfaces, security, disaster recovery, compliance with regulatory requirements and data integration (phenotypic data with genomics data). Dr. Ramamurthy will discuss these challenges and the data systems, being developed at the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research in Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) for researchers in the TMC, to automate and enable biomedical research work in Houston, nationally and internationally.

Bio:
Uma Ramamurthy leads the Research Informatics team at the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research in Baylor College of Medicine.   Prior to joining BCM in 2011, for 13 years, Dr. Ramamurthy was the Director of Computing for the NCI funded Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium (PBTC) which includes 12 sites across the US. She was also instrumental in setting up the Data Coordinating Center (DCC) for the NHLBI funded trial of transcranial ultrasound surveillance in sickle cell disease (SCATE trial) in the U.S., Jamaica and Brazil. With a background in electrical engineering, computer science and business administration, Dr. Ramamurthy has over 15 years of technology/management experience in biomedical and clinical research, including hardware deployments, design and development of application and database systems. Her expertise is in design, development and management of IT solutions for all aspects of clinical and translational research including imaging data acquisition and processing.