Health informatics focuses on analyzing, understanding, and interpreting health data from multiple sources including electronic health records, structured databases, wearables devices, online posts from support groups, blogs, and social media channels. IST's core research area on Health Informatics aims at improving the ways we design novel systems and understand disease outbreaks, disease trajectories, and patient's health outcomes, behaviors, and attitudes. To achieve excellence in the quality of service and facilitate healthcare delivery, our goal is to assist physicians, healthcare professionals, patients, and their support network in easily accessing, interpreting, and drawing conclusions from health data. Our methods include natural language processing for unlocking the information conveyed in free text narratives of electronic health records, as well as social media analytics from social media and blog posts. Also, we investigate machine learning models and algorithms to predict health outcomes, and temporal analysis to understand how diseases progress. Lastly, we practice user-centered design to develop interactive tools that connect data, medical practitioners, patients, and their support network.
Subfields:
- Assistive and Accessible Technology
- Electronic Health Records
- Health and Medical Informatics
- Medical Imaging
- Patient-Doctor Communication
- Social Media Mining
- Wearable Technology