Cynthia Brandt, MD, MPH

Much of my work has focused on building informatics infrastructure for clinical research, working closely with many clinical research groups, and performing research focused on issues such as the management of clinical vocabularies used in clinical research databases and implementation of computerized clinical practice guidelines. Another focus is informatics research working on the development and the application and use of open-source informatics tools for information retrieval and information extraction from the VA’s electronic health record free-text data.

I have worked for years building informatics infrastructure for clinical research, working closely with many clinical research groups, and performing research focused on issues such as the management of clinical vocabularies used in clinical research databases and implementation of computerized clinical practice guidelines. I currently provide mentoring and training for both Yale national library of medicine informatics fellows and pre-doctoral students, and VA special informatics fellows. Research projects with fellows have included broad informatics domains including: clinical guidelines, clinical research databases, natural language processing, the design and application of informatics tools, personal health records, handheld computing, evaluation of informatics projects, and the design and use of electronic medical record data for quality, health services research and clinical decision support. Informatics is an interdisciplinary specialty and my past mentees have included emergency medicine, primary care and other types of clinicians, nurses and computer scientists. I also have extensive experience in health services research and currently have funded projects that use VA Electronic health record (VistA) and administrative and Corporate Data Warehouse data. I am co-leading an interdisciplinary team that received funding to develop the Pain Management Collaboratory Coordinating Center, that provides national leadership and serves as a national resource in conducting high-impact pragmatic clinical trials on non-drug approaches to manage pain and other comorbid conditions in veteran and military health care systems.