Clinical Informatics Research Group
The Clinical Informatics Research Group designs, develops, and operates information systems to support research to improving individual and population health.
CIRG systems securely manage health information for projects in the Clinical, Public Health, and Global Health Informatics domains.
Its collaborators are based at the University of Washington, and at health care organizations across the US and around the world.
The Dog Aging Project (DAP, http://www.dogagingproject.com) is devoted to understanding the genetic and environmental determinants of healthy aging in companion dogs. To do this, we are creating a longitudinal study of 10,000 companion (pet) dogs throughout the country.
We will gather information about each dog’s genetics, molecular biology, home environment (including social setting, air and water quality, behavior, etc.), and electronic veterinary records. We will also explore the potential of interventions to improve healthspan in companion dogs.
Our large-scale study will teach us much about the genetic and environmental determinants of healthy aging in a diverse population, and has direct translational relevance for human populations.
The mission of the DeRouen Center, established in 2017, is to promote collaboration and inclusivity in scientific and clinical research that impacts global oral health. Through dedicated teamwork, our center promotes worldwide oral health. We are strategically targeting our efforts to four geographical areas with sites where we have been successfully working: Southeast Asia (with Thailand as our lead site), Africa (with Kenya as our lead site), South America (with Peru as the lead), and Seattle.
Thailand: For over 25 years, the School of Dentistry, University of Washington (UW), has collaborated with Khon Kaen and Thammasat Universities to conduct The Fogarty International Center Training Program in Clinical, Public Health and Behavioral Oral Health Research for Thailand. Through comprehensive workshops and Summer Institutes in Clinical Dental Research Methods, participants received education and training in biostatistics, clinical epidemiology and study design, behavioral research methods, data analysis, clinical trials, grantsmanship, research ethics, and research proposal development. A selected subset of participants completed a two-year long program requiring one year of coursework at UW (which applied towards a Ph.D. program at their home institution) implementation of a research study, Ph.D. dissertation defense, and article publication. Founded in 2002, the revolutionary program has brought Thailand to the international forefront of oral health research.
Kenya: The Universities of Washington and Nairobi have a more than 25-year partnership in maternal-child HIV research. In 2015, we established a new working group focused on improving oral health in HIV-infected and HIV-exposed non-infected children. This collaborative effort is nested within the NIH funded Kenyan Pediatric Studies (KPS) and the study team consists of specialists in molecular epidemiology, pediatrics, dentistry, integration and implementation sciences, epidemiology and neurocognitive science. We initiated our work in 2015 with parents’ assessment of oral manifestations of HIV among the KPS cohorts. In January 2016, with the support of a UW Global Innovation Award, Dr. Seminario conducted training and calibration of dental community health officers and medical providers in the diagnosis of oral manifestations of HIV in Nairobi. Currently, Dr. Seminario has been awarded the 2017 UW SunStar Preventive Dentistry Award to investigate correlations between oral inflammation with general inflammation among these children. In addition, we have expanded our collaboration to Nigeria and were awarded by the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) Regional Development Program for the development of a regional site in Africa targeting the impact of HIV on the oral health of children and adolescents.
Peru: Since 2014, we have had two supplemental NIH (from Fogarty International Center) grants that allowed the development of two 5-day workshops in clinical dental research methods. Approximately seventy junior dental faculty participated in these trainings including attendees from various geographical areas within Peru as well as from other Latin American countries (Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Brazil). Participants were from various specialties, including: orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, endodontics, implantology, community dentistry, special care needs, esthetics, prosthodontics, and periodontics. Workshop topics included general scientific principles in planning and carrying out clinical research projects; levels of evidence in evidence-based clinical research; study designs, their applications, and the levels of evidence they produce; principles in the design and conduct of randomized clinical trials; statistical concepts and principles in testing hypotheses and evaluating evidence from clinical studies; basic behavioral models and principles in clinical dental research; ethical issues in the conduct of research on human subjects; and grantsmanship. Currently, we are partnering with our colleagues in Landscape Architecture and in Environment Health to assess the impact of environment interventions on oral and gut microbiome in a floating community on the Amazon River, in Iquitos, Peru.
Seattle: We are partnering with the SeaMar Community Clinics to improve the quality of life of refugees coming to Seattle for resettlement. The goal of this collaboration is to increase dental utilization by children from refugee families as Medicaid fully covers any pediatric oral health need including treatment under general anesthesia and these families are Medicaid enrolled soon after they arrive to our country. Through this program, we will be researching the impact of oral health on children’s growth and quality of life.
Bringing faculty, staff, and students together with community to address the most challenging urban issues today and in the future. We work across disciplines, professions, and expertise to catalyze improvements in human and environmental health in cities and urban landscapes around the globe.
Over the past 30 years, children in the United States have become gradually less active, less able to do physical activities, and less healthy. Inactive lifestyles are taking away the capacity of children and adolescents to function and develop normally and to achieve peak health.
UW Medicine’s Sports Health and Safety Institute (SHSI) is an international education, advocacy and research organization devoted to helping people pursue an active lifestyle while providing tools to keep them safe and speed healing after illness or injury.
Founded in 2015, SHSI focuses on three core activities:
- Education. Safe sports, good health decisions, excellent care and informed policy begin with education. The Institute’s educational materials are freely available to parents, athletes, coaches and medical professionals.
- Advocacy. SHSI pursues policies and supports legislation that advance sports safety and health.
- Research. SHSI collaborates with researchers to identify best practices for effective public health education, to change behaviors and make sports safer, and to advance knowledge about sports-related concussion.
The UW Psychiatry Division of Population Health is dedicated to improving the health of the public by developing, testing, evaluating, and implementing effective behavioral health interventions across the entire spectrum of health care delivery.
We are committed to finding new and innovative approaches to providing effective behavioral health care to defined populations. Our strength lies in knowledge transfer and practice-based learning with implementation work driving new research questions and research results driving new implementation methodology. Our researchers conduct both qualitative and quantitative research and use large data sets to establish benchmarks for treatment outcomes and to study variation across patients, providers, practice and policy.
The Division of Population Health focuses on four primary challenges facing mental health care:
Improving Access
Although there are numerous effective treatments for psychiatric disorders, these treatments often do not reach the patients who need them. We develop and test innovations that increase the healthcare system’s capacity to deliver effective treatments and increase patient’s access to and engagement in effective treatments. Scientific Aims:
- Shift treatment tasks to lower levels of care and encourage patient
self-management to increase capacity. - Use technology to substitute virtual care encounters for face-to-face visits to increase access.
- Use virtual care technologies to augment face-to-face visits by facilitating between-visit patient-provider communications and to better determine when face-to-face visits are needed in order to increase both access and capacity.
- “Flip the clinic” and deliver care in non-traditional settings, including the home, to increase access.
Targeting Treatment
For individuals with psychiatric disorders who engage in treatment, it often takes too long to find the right treatment (or combination of treatments) that is most effective. We identify and test methods for predicting which treatment or treatments will be most effective for a particular patient, as well as methods for more quickly detecting when treatment is ineffective. Scientific Aims:
- Develop and test feasible methods for measurement-based care to facilitate identifying treatment non-response.
- Test approaches to promoting shared decision making to encourage the delivery of treatments that address patients’ treatment goals.
- Identify important treatment moderators to help patients and providers choose the right treatment.
- Determine how pharmacogenetics can inform treatment decision making to facilitate precision medicine.
Closing the Mortality Gap
Individuals living with psychiatric disorders endure a greater burden of illness over their lifetimes and experience higher mortality rates. For individuals living with a psychiatric disorder, we develop clinical and public health interventions that promote healthy lifestyles, higher quality of care for physical health disorders and better management of side effects of psychotropic medications. Scientific Aims:
- Develop and test smoking cessation, opioid tapering, and exercise programs for patients with psychiatric disorders.
- Develop and test models of integrating of physical health care into specialty mental health settings.
- Develop and test feasible methods to monitor metabolic side effects of psychotropic medications.
- Develop and test clinical and public health interventions to prevent suicide.
Bridging the Research-Practice Chasm
It takes too long for newly developed evidence-based treatments to be adopted by providers and incorporated into routine care. To bridge the chasm between research and practice, we identify and test implementation strategies that effectively promote the adoption of new evidence-based practices. Scientific Aims:
- Identify variations in the quality of care and deployment of evidence based practices in routine care.
- Identify valid quality metrics and pay-for-performance systems.
- Develop and test clinical decision support systems that encourage evidence based care.
- Test alternative training and facilitation strategies to promote implementation.
- Adapt existing evidence based practices for different populations and clinic settings.
The mission of the Women’s Center is to create a more inclusive and compassionate society by promoting gender equity and social justice through educational programs and services that allows all participants to succeed in life.
Washington Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) helps people in vulnerable populations understand and secure their legal rights regarding safe housing, adequate schooling, medical needs and more. It partners with lawyers, doctors, social workers, and other medical staff to remove barriers to good health.
Created in 2013 by the state legislature, the Washington Ocean Acidification Center at UW connects researchers, policymakers, industry, and others across Washington.
Their goals aim to advance the science of ocean acidification and provide a foundation for proactive strategies and policies to protect marine ecosystems and the people connected to them.
The West Coast Poverty Center works to bridge the gaps between antipoverty research, practice, and policy by connecting scholars, policymakers and practitioners; facilitating important social policy research; magnifying the reach of new knowledge; and fostering the next generation of antipoverty scholars.
Assistant Professor based at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, focusing on a variety of population health topics, including Neglected Tropical Diseases, Vector-borne, Zoonotoc and potentially pandemic pathogens
Our core works on social, behavioral and public health related research supporting HIV prevention and care.
The specific aims of the Sociobehavioral and Prevention Research Core are to support:
HIV Prevention Research, including technical assistance to CFAR investigators, organizing forums for interdisciplinary research community development, expanding our substantive expertise to include addictions, substance use, and mental health research.
Local Community Outreach, including working with CFAR’s Community Action Board to pursue community-based research priorities and translational opportunities, taking advantage of our institutional ties to Seattle & King County Public Health to stimulate collaborative research projects and evidence-based policy development.
International Community Outreach, including working with the International Core to identify collaborative research and translational opportunities with the new University of Nairobi Center for HIV Prevention and Research (UNCHIVPR) on translational research for HIV prevention. Integrating social, behavioral, and clinical science is increasingly necessary for progress in controlling HIV, and the Sociobehavioral and Prevention Research Core works to assure this synergy by providing support to behavioral, clinical, and social scientists in their research.
Over the past 30 years, children in the United States have become gradually less active, less able to do physical activities, and less healthy. Inactive lifestyles are taking away the capacity of children and adolescents to function and develop normally and to achieve peak health.
UW Medicine’s Sports Health and Safety Institute (SHSI) is an international education, advocacy and research organization devoted to helping people pursue an active lifestyle while providing tools to keep them safe and speed healing after illness or injury.
Founded in 2015, SHSI focuses on three core activities:
- Education. Safe sports, good health decisions, excellent care and informed policy begin with education. The Institute’s educational materials are freely available to parents, athletes, coaches and medical professionals.
- Advocacy. SHSI pursues policies and supports legislation that advance sports safety and health.
- Research. SHSI collaborates with researchers to identify best practices for effective public health education, to change behaviors and make sports safer, and to advance knowledge about sports-related concussion.
Assessment of health and quality of life of vulnerable populations including people with disabilities. Tracking of US national health goals with years of healthy life indicator.
Suzinne Pak-Gorstein MD, MPH, PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics; Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Global Health; Co-Director of the Nutrition Think Tank for the Global Center for Integrated Health of Women, Adolescents and Children (WACh-NTT); and Co-Director of the Resident Education and Advocacy for Global Child Health-Kenya program (REACH-Kenya Pathway).
As a clinician-educator, Suzinne trains pediatric residents and graduate students, and is a course instructor and lecturer for UW undergraduate courses on the topics of global public health and global nutrition/food systems. Her main research and service interest is the provision of culturally sensitive and high-quality care for refugee children in the US with a focus on obesity, undernutrition, and caring for medically complex refugee children. She also has interests in program monitoring and evaluation in low-income country settings and has been involved with nutrition surveillance systems, national surveys, and establishment of health information systems in several countries including Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, and Bangladesh.
Suzinne is the Co-Chair of the Academic Pediatric Association’s Global Health Special Interest Group, liaison to the Coalition of Centres in Global Child Health (CCGCH), and active member of the American Academy of Pediatric’s Section on International Child Health. Suzinne participated in the design and implementation of the UW Pediatric Residency Global Health Pathway Program which is a bilateral exchange program that trains pediatric residents from Seattle and Nairobi to integrate population health concepts and approaches into pediatric service through community health assessments, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement. The Global Health Pathways program (now named REACH-Kenya) was bestowed the 2014 Academic Pediatric Association Teaching Program Award.
The Northwest Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit seeks to reduce environmental health risks to children by providing training for health professionals, communities and families through consultation, educational activities, and referrals.
The PEHSU is a North American network of experts dedicated to providing expertise and training for health professionals, trainees and the public on environmentally related health effects in children.
PEHSU faculty are academically based at university hospitals and include pediatricians, toxicologists, exposure scientists and others.
The HIV Technical Cooperation Group (TCG) was formed as a pragmatic ‘think tank’ where thought leaders and practitioners exchange ideas, share best practices and catalyze innovation to build capacity in Public Health for HIV prevention and care.
Its goal is to make all TCG events highly-interactive working-group sessions that focus on pragmatic approaches to infrastructure issues in HIV public health.
Global Center for Integrated Health of Women, Adolescents and Children was created to break down the traditional silos between departments and capitalize on the benefits created when multiple disciplines approach a topic with the same end goal in mind. Maternal health expertise from the Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology, neonatal and child health expertise from the Department of Pediatrics, and vast experience working in infectious disease, health evaluation, education, clinical research, and service delivery within the Department of Global Health all combine to create a methodology that views women, children, and adolescents not as three independent populations but as interconnected.
My main career focus has been on program implementation. I’m currently the PI for a PCORI-funded comparative effectiveness study involving low-income people with asthma between the ages of 5 and 75y, who are patients at either NeighborCare Health or Health Point. We are testing two interventions: a Community Health Worker who visits the patient’s home, and an enhanced clinic intervention. Most of this work is accomplished at King Country Health Department.
We’re using this project as pilot work to prepare a large (six-year) U01 proposal to NIH to test an integrated community-based pediatric asthma intervention to reduce disparities in health outcomes. If funded, the project would be run primarily through the King and Pierce County Heath Departments.
I’m also the site PI of a large international implementation study funded by the European Commission, called Fresh Air 2020. http://www.theipcrg.org/freshair. UW is one of 14 funded centers around the world. The four target countries are Uganda, Kyrgyzstan, Greece, and Vietnam. In each of these developing countries, we are working to implement a variety of evidence based strategies to improve respiratory health (further detailed on website). I lead delivery of an online training and feedback program known as Spirometry 360, and the overall Implementation Science effort.
Since 2009, our evidence-based, 5-month online Spirometry 360 program has been delivered to over 300 primary care sites around the country, as well as to clinical sites in Australia, Holland Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Kenya, in addition to the countries mentioned in the FA 2020 project above.
The mission of the DeRouen Center, established in 2017, is to promote collaboration and inclusivity in scientific and clinical research that impacts global oral health. Through dedicated teamwork, our center promotes worldwide oral health. We are strategically targeting our efforts to four geographical areas with sites where we have been successfully working: Southeast Asia (with Thailand as our lead site), Africa (with Kenya as our lead site), South America (with Peru as the lead), and Seattle.
Thailand: For over 25 years, the School of Dentistry, University of Washington (UW), has collaborated with Khon Kaen and Thammasat Universities to conduct The Fogarty International Center Training Program in Clinical, Public Health and Behavioral Oral Health Research for Thailand. Through comprehensive workshops and Summer Institutes in Clinical Dental Research Methods, participants received education and training in biostatistics, clinical epidemiology and study design, behavioral research methods, data analysis, clinical trials, grantsmanship, research ethics, and research proposal development. A selected subset of participants completed a two-year long program requiring one year of coursework at UW (which applied towards a Ph.D. program at their home institution) implementation of a research study, Ph.D. dissertation defense, and article publication. Founded in 2002, the revolutionary program has brought Thailand to the international forefront of oral health research.
Kenya: The Universities of Washington and Nairobi have a more than 25-year partnership in maternal-child HIV research. In 2015, we established a new working group focused on improving oral health in HIV-infected and HIV-exposed non-infected children. This collaborative effort is nested within the NIH funded Kenyan Pediatric Studies (KPS) and the study team consists of specialists in molecular epidemiology, pediatrics, dentistry, integration and implementation sciences, epidemiology and neurocognitive science. We initiated our work in 2015 with parents’ assessment of oral manifestations of HIV among the KPS cohorts. In January 2016, with the support of a UW Global Innovation Award, Dr. Seminario conducted training and calibration of dental community health officers and medical providers in the diagnosis of oral manifestations of HIV in Nairobi. Currently, Dr. Seminario has been awarded the 2017 UW SunStar Preventive Dentistry Award to investigate correlations between oral inflammation with general inflammation among these children. In addition, we have expanded our collaboration to Nigeria and were awarded by the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) Regional Development Program for the development of a regional site in Africa targeting the impact of HIV on the oral health of children and adolescents.
Peru: Since 2014, we have had two supplemental NIH (from Fogarty International Center) grants that allowed the development of two 5-day workshops in clinical dental research methods. Approximately seventy junior dental faculty participated in these trainings including attendees from various geographical areas within Peru as well as from other Latin American countries (Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Brazil). Participants were from various specialties, including: orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, endodontics, implantology, community dentistry, special care needs, esthetics, prosthodontics, and periodontics. Workshop topics included general scientific principles in planning and carrying out clinical research projects; levels of evidence in evidence-based clinical research; study designs, their applications, and the levels of evidence they produce; principles in the design and conduct of randomized clinical trials; statistical concepts and principles in testing hypotheses and evaluating evidence from clinical studies; basic behavioral models and principles in clinical dental research; ethical issues in the conduct of research on human subjects; and grantsmanship. Currently, we are partnering with our colleagues in Landscape Architecture and in Environment Health to assess the impact of environment interventions on oral and gut microbiome in a floating community on the Amazon River, in Iquitos, Peru.
Seattle: We are partnering with the SeaMar Community Clinics to improve the quality of life of refugees coming to Seattle for resettlement. The goal of this collaboration is to increase dental utilization by children from refugee families as Medicaid fully covers any pediatric oral health need including treatment under general anesthesia and these families are Medicaid enrolled soon after they arrive to our country. Through this program, we will be researching the impact of oral health on children’s growth and quality of life.
Dr. Wade is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing & Health Studies at the University of Washington Bothell.
His scholarly work applies social and behavioral research methods to identify ways of improving public health interventions.
His primary focus is on new health technology assessment, particularly with respect to the integration of genomic information into health practice.
He has also conducted studies which explore methods for improving educational practices for future public health professionals.
Additionally, Dr. Wade has worked with community partners to address HIV prevention interventions, health literacy, and access to healthcare by underserved populations.
The purpose of this research group is to examine social and racial inequalities that results in health disparities. This UW Bothell-based group examines the social context, and social predictors of poor health across multiple chronic health indicators across a diverse group of foreign born and native born respondents.
A key focus of this group is to examine the relationship between perceived and actual racial/ethnic discrimination in health.
The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis and Air Pollution (MESA Air) is designed to examine the relationship between air pollution exposures and the progression of cardiovascular disease over time. The United States Environmental Protection Agency funds the ten-year study, which involves thousands of participants, representing diverse areas of the United States.
The MESA Air Pollution study is headquartered at the University of Washington, but many other institutions are also involved.
Research conducted by University of Washington Tacoma scientists at the Center for Urban Waters seeks to understand and quantify the sources, pathways and impacts of chemical pollutants in urban waterways.
Highly sensitive analytical tools to measure contaminant levels are combined with sophisticated computer models to track pollutant sources and transport in the Puget Sound region.
The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies supports a network of scholars in cutting-edge research, education, and outreach about work, workers and their organizations.
The Center engages students in labor studies through courses and field work. It promotes connections between students, faculty, and labor communities locally and around the world, and inform policy makers about issues confronting workers.
The Center brings together faculty, staff, students and members of the community to research and find solutions to pressing social problems through a variety of research and education projects.
The Center’s research and educational programs in the humanities and social sciences focus on community issues, social justice leadership, labor and civil rights concerns, and multi-cultural education.
The Center collaborates with other projects and centers and helps to support the Community and Social Change degree track of the Masters of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences department at the University of Washington Tacoma.