Dr. Erich Huang is featured this week on the Duke Translational Medicine Institute (DTMI) website. As the faculty recruit to the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within the Department, Duke was familiar territory, he had completed the MD/PhD program in 2003 and was an assistant professor in Surgery before going to Seattle to become the director for cancer research at Sage Bionetworks. “But what attracted me to return to Duke was the opportunity to actually implement some of these ideas in an academic health system.”
Discussing his current projects included the Duke Data Service to create an infrastructure that makes it easy for investigators to gather and store the data they collect and generate it in a transparent manner so that others can reproduce their scientific findings. Another project is CALYPSO – the Clinical and Analytic Learning Platform for Surgical Outcomes where machine learning and electronic health records are used to predict whether a surgical patient is going to have one of a variety of complications. The aim is to provide predictions in real time so that rounding teams can have the information at hand during their rounds.
Dr. Huang also discussed the big data challenge of interoperability, that is finding easy ways for information to be securely exchanged between providers and platforms. We gather so much data, but often we can’t share it. We need to find tools that allow us to move and share data. It is absolutely essential for improving healthcare nationally.