Biomedical Informatics & Data Science

To the BIDS community,

This is the first newsletter from the ‘Department’ of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. This is a landmark not only for BIDS and Yale, but for our field in general. The first department of medical informatics in the USA dates was created in the 1960’s (University of Utah in 1964), with a few launched in the following decades. With the transition of the section into a department, our specialty receives the needed recognition at Yale as we move ahead with many new initiatives, and celebrate Yale for bringing its world leading medical expertise and informatics into a center for innovation.

The process of developing a department is not always straightforward. While 16 months may look fast, we stood on the shoulders of those who have been practicing informatics at Yale for a long time: clinical informatics experts and many computational biologists were working in clinical and bioinformatics for many decades. We have recruited several new faculty to fill strategic gaps and we are starting a new phase where the boundaries of clinical and bioinformatics become fuzzier. We now have a department that can serve as a hub for physicians, informaticians and biomedical data scientists, a unit that make its own academic appointments and develop its own degree programs while connecting everyone together.

Please join me in congratulating everyone for this important milestone. Through this newsletter, take a moment to learn what we are doing at BIDS, and join us at the start of this incredible journey!

– Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, MBA, PhD

Waldemar von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics

Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science

1. Yale is the lead institution in the ‘All of Us’ Research Consortium, receiving a large grant from NIH.
2. Rohan Khera, MD, MS, and his CarDS lab, presented groundbreaking clinical research at the 2024 American College of Cardiology Scientific Sessions.
3. Hua Xu, PhD, FACMI, launches the Yale University LLM and NLP Interest Group. They meet every second Wednesday.
4. Deborah Levy, MD, MPH, is first author of a new VA cohort study on gabapentin.
5. Terika McCall, PhD, MPH, MBA, appeared as a guest on the For Your Informatics podcast, discussing breakthroughs and insights at the intersection of digital health and mental health.
6. Ethel Nalule's photography is on display in Sterling Hall of Medicine.
   
7. Lee Schwamm, MD, was an expert witness to the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Health, discussing the role and future of telehealth.
8. Jeffrey Cohen, MD, co-authored a study finding a significant association between eczema (atopic dermatitis) and eating disorders. The researchers analyzed data from more than 250,000 electronic medical records of patients participating in the All of Us Research Program.
9. Mark Gerstein, PhD, features in Yale News, for a new study of nearly 400 human brains that could help enable precision-medicine for neuropsychiatric disease.
10. Yuan Lu, ScD, Yuntian Liu, MPH, Wade Schulz, MD, and others use real-world data to identify the most effective hypertension drugs for patients
11. On Connecticut Public Radio, Melissa Davis, MD, MBA, discusses her research finding racial bias in ChatGPT’s radiology reports
12. A team of BIDS faculty and students, including Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS, David Chartash, PhD, Qingyu Chen, PhD, Vimig Socrates, MS, Thomas Huang, Xuguang Ai, MS, and Soraya Fereydooni, earned 2nd place out 89 participants in the BioNLP ACL'24 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation.
13. Hang Zhou, PhD, and others use VA health data to complete the first well-powered, genome-wide association study of epiretinal membrane, a common retinal disorder.