Managing Medical Knowledge

According to Dr. Clement McDonald, Distinguished Professor of Medicine, I.U. Medical School, and Director of the Regenstrief Institute, "The fragmentation of information is a serious barrier to health care and medical research productivity and quality. In fact, information technology is now regarded as a major tool for creating more efficient and less costly health care and research."

Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis has been at the forefront of a national movement to remedy this situation by integrating clinical information across individual systems, institutions, and communities. Dr. McDonald, a pioneer in medical informatics, used funding from the National Cancer Institute to develop software that allowed researchers to share information-such as pathology reports and survival rates-about cancer patients. This information sharing protects patient privacy, but gives researchers an invaluable statistical resource.

Now, with the help of a 21st Century Research and Technology Fund grant, he and others at Regenstrief are developing a Center of Excellence in biomedical informatics. At the heart of this center are large databases of findings and outcomes that allow researchers using statistical methods to explore hypotheses about causes and cures of disease without ever seeing any patient level data. This integrated research infrastructure will accelerate most of the human research done on the I.U. campus and by other Indiana academic and industrial collaborators.

A second and related project, also receiving 21st Century Fund assistance, is led by Dr. Susanne Ragg, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, IUPUI, who is working to establish a Center of Excellence in computational diagnostics at IUPUI. "The Center," she explains, "will bring together existing computational, math, and molecular research capabilities to help doctors and researchers utilize resources in fields far outside their own. This fully integrated service will result in substantial savings in resources, improvements in quality control, and better communication across disciplines."

These two projects will help give Indiana an important place in the future of biomedicine. The information infrastructure they establish will stimulate biomedical research, increase the competitiveness of Indiana researchers, and attract biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and information system companies-and the jobs they offer-to the State.