Research is one of the core components of the Clinical Informatics Center. Our faculty members decide together the highest potential research focus and follow standard research protocol. The synergy among our members leads to significant progress on the targeted research area.

General Clinical Informatics

Our Clinical Informatics experts share information and collaborate on issues such as documentation, education of clinicians, update and improvement of clinical systems, standards and terminologies, acquisition and presentation of data, and integration of information around Clinical Informatics at UT Southwestern and the Affiliated Network.

Consumer Informatics

Consumer Informatics focuses on methods and approaches to engage, educate, and encourage active participation in care by patients and their caregivers. Consumer Informatics aims to improve healthy lifestyle choices, identify ways to communicate complex problems earlier and more cost effectively, and improve outcomes. The major vehicle for the research for Consumer Informatics is the patient portal and its mobile application as well as other approaches like telephony or mobile medical apps.

Knowledge Architecture

This research area focuses on Knowledge Architecture and management, lifecycle analysis, enterprise resource planning, and the enterprise content management around it. Our work is critical to designing and maintaining the knowledge architecture that effectively supports people and processes through an effective intellectual infrastructure architecture within UT Southwestern. Research efforts focus on novel ways of managing knowledge, syncing production and testing systems, and exploring new ways to detect deterioration of knowledge artifacts.

Clinical Decision Support

Clinical Decision Support evaluates novel approaches of decision support, improve the effectiveness and decrease the burden of CDS, focus on cost savings and improved quality of care, and develop a new infrastructure to measure the functioning and effectiveness of enterprise CDS. Our research explores innovative relationships with outside CDS vendors with the vision of becoming a source of CDS for other organizations.

People, Organizations, and Technology Research

Focusing on the people (from design to usability to adoption) and the organization (impact on workflow and processes), we develop conceptual resources and implementation guidance related to the implementation of predictive algorithms in clinical settings, including ethical issues, patient and caregiver involvement, special cases such as military settings, and the impact on clinical personnel with minimal training in prediction science. We collaborate with data scientists to conduct innovative workflow and other user-centered research. The Clinical Informatics Center creates techniques and tools to reduce implementation burden, minimize organizational disruption and inefficiency. We build on strategies that are the most effective for organizational success and advise the HealthIT education and training staff about strategies that are most successful for different personality types.

Analytics and Modeling

Using data from the UT Southwestern operational systems and collaborating closely with the Department of Population and Data Sciences, we develop new models to predict progression of illness, complications, readmissions, and outliers in the cost of care and will evaluate these models for the potential of implementation in our systems. Our research specifically focuses on complex, high costs diseases.