What happens when you bring together three previous heads of biomedical informatics departments? A lot of reflection, storytelling, and joking around! In this episode, we bring together guests who have previously run informatics departments and are still involved in various ways, whether through research, teaching, or creating content to educate the public. We get the inside scoop into all the administrative responsibilities of these department chairs, their favorite parts of the job, and how they hope to see the field respond to modern technological developments like AI.

We had some fantastic guests on this episode. Dr. William (Bill) Hersh is a Professor in the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Dr. Hersh served as the inaugural Chair of DMICE from its inception in 2003 through 2022. He also served as Director of OHSU's Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, from its inception in 1996 through 2023. Dr. Hersh also conceptualized and implemented the first offering of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10x10 ("ten by ten") program; his course has been completed by more than 3000 individuals since 2005. In addition, he serves as Editor of the textbook, Health Informatics: Practical Guide, 8th Edition. Since stepping down as department chair, Dr. Hersh has maintained his research and teaching activities, and writes the Informatics Professor blog.

Dr. George Hripcsak is the Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor at Columbia University's Department of Biomedical Informatics. He led Columbia University's informatics department for 15 years. He currently leads the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics coordinating center, which organizes the health records of almost one billion patients. He has authored over 350 scientific papers, serves as the PI for Columbia's recruitment center for the All of Us precision medicine program, and focuses his research on developing the next generation of health record systems.

Finally, our host turned guest for this episode! Dr. Kevin Johnson is the David L. Cohen University Professor of Pediatrics, Biomedical Informatics, and Science Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Before Penn, he was the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University from 2012-2022. He currently researches how to integrate advanced technology and artificial intelligence with health documentation systems. And, of course, he loves sharing informatics with a wider audience whether through his children's books, his documentary projects, or this podcast!

Thanks to our host Harris Bland and our production assistant Ellie Shuert for leading us through this discussion. We loved reminiscing together, and we hope you enjoy getting an inside look into informatics departments!

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and TikTok accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. You can also find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Instagram: @infointhernd

Twitter: @infointhernd

Threads: @infointhernd

TikTok: @infointhernd

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/projects

How does social media challenge or reinforce our own biases? On this episode, we sat down with the University of Pennsylvania's Desmond Upton Patton to discuss his research on social media and adolescence. We talk about the many roles social media has for young people and how they have taken advantage of social media as a storytelling mechanism and a tool for navigating safety. We discuss how social media can also be reductionist, reinforce negative stereotypes, and even perpetuate misinformation, revealing the flaws in AI and similar technologies. Desmond talks us through all these facets of social media in relation to his work and challenges us to think about what it would look like to recognize social media as increasingly integrated into our reality.

We were so excited to have Dr. Desmond Upton Patton with us for this episode. Desmond is not only a great friend, but an incredible scholar. As a social worker, researcher, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Desmond has published groundbreaking research on the linkage between grief and aggressive behavior on social media platforms, and now his research focuses on the topics such AI, social media, machine learning, empathy, and race with the goal to create unbiased and culturally conscious algorithms. In addition, he serves on the research and safety advisory boards of Twitter, Spotify, and TikTok, and he has been chosen as part of the inaugural cohort of Obama Foundation Leaders for his research. Now, he is the director for the research initiative known as SAFELab at the Annenberg School for Communication, a project we will hear more about in this episode!

We also had with us songwriters Alissa Abeler and Hannah Smith from the Americana duo The Daily Fare. They shared amazing insights not just on their own experiences with social media, but also on songwriting and the storytelling process.

We were so thankful to have this group of people in discussion with us, and we hope you enjoy the episode!

Mentioned in this episode: 

-Sing Me a Story

-AIDS Memorial Quilt

-Follow SAFELab on Twitter

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and Facebook accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. You can also find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Instagram: @infointhernd

Twitter: @infointhernd

Threads: @infointhernd

TikTok: @infointhernd

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/podcast

Is every clinical trial created equal? In this episode, we learn some shocking information about the proportions of populations normally included in clinical trials. We specifically cover recent treatments for Alzheimer’s disease to discuss how we may have failed to consider minority populations in our research and how we can use precision medicine to create more equitable clinical trials. We also discuss how we can redevelop trust in scientific institutions in the wake of the pandemic and how health professionals can adapt their research techniques to include data from historically underrepresented populations.

We had a wonderful cast join us for this episode. We had Stephanie Monroe, Vice President and Senior Advisor of Health Equity and Access for UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, a national advocacy group that aims to diversify the movement to cure Alzheimer’s disease. After working on Capitol Hill and holding the position of Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights for three years, Stephanie’s work has focused on raising awareness about the disparate impact of Alzheimer’s disease on communities of color and women.

We also had Consuelo Wilkins, Senior Vice President and Senior Associate Dean of Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence, and a Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and works with the All of Us Research Program, a national precision medicine project. She is also the Principal Investigator of three NIH-funded centers which aim to decrease health disparities for communities of color and create new approaches to recruiting marginalized communities for clinical trials. 

This conversation was so fun and yielded so many valuable insights regarding how we can create more equitable research for communities of color. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Interested in how misinformation circulates? Listen to our previous podcast episode with guest Evan Thornburg.

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and Facebook accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. You can also find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Instagram: @infointhernd

Twitter: @infointhernd 

Threads: @infointhernd

TikTok: @infointhernd 

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/podcast

In this episode, we tackle an all-too-familiar topic: misinformation. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen how technology and social media can be used to both spread health information awareness and popularize misinformation. The question remains: in the age of technology, how can we be sure about the validity of the information we are receiving online, and how can we all be vigilant against the spread of misinformation?

To help us, we had the wonderful Evan Thornburg join us for today's podcast. Evan is a bioethicist and health equity officer for the City of Pennsylvania's Department of Public Health. In the past, they've also worked in the Philadelphia Mayor's Office as Deputy Director of LGBT. After completing a Master's of Arts in Urban Bioethics at Temple University's Lewis Katz School of Medicine and writing their thesis on the spread of misinformation, Evan took to TikTok, utilizing the platform to share their knowledge about bioethics, comment on current health news, and challenge the online community to be discerning about how they absorb and converse about health information. You can find Evan on TikTok at EVN the (Bio) Ethicist.

We loved talking with Evan, and we hope you come out of this episode with some practical tools to help you filter the information you see on social media!

Learn more about ethical research conduct from government websites such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the American Psychological Association. 

Check out what the American Board of Internal Medicine has to say about the rise of misinformation:

-https://blog.abim.org/an-update-on-our-efforts-to-address-medical-misinformation/

-https://blog.abim.org/new-paper-recommends-creating-a-durably-funded-infrastructure-for-media-monitoring-and-effective-coordinated-responses-to-medical-misinformation/

Learn more about the work Desmond Upton Patton is doing with SAFELab here: https://www.asc.upenn.edu/research/centers/safe-lab

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and Facebook accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. You can also find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Instagram: @infointhernd

Twitter: @infointhernd 

Threads: @infointhernd

TikTok: @infointhernd 

Facebook: @Informatics in the Round 

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/podcast

In this episode, we look at the genetic basis for different psychiatric disorders, the interconnectedness of psychological and physical symptoms, and how they apply to our ongoing conversation regarding health equity. For this episode, we welcomed back some of our previous guests:

Lea Davis Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Division of Genetic Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her work explores the genomic architecture of complex traits, defined as the type, frequency, and function of DNA variants en masse that contribute to the genetic predisposition of a given trait.

We also welcomed back the talented Jane Bach, a successful songwriter from Nashville, to help us dissect how exactly gene inheritance works and share her stories and music with us! Ellie Shuert, our new production assistant from the University of Pennsylvania, also joined in for the discussion. They both made our conversation so lively and fun, and they really helped us dig deep into the fundamentals of genetics and the importance of listening intentionally to patients' stories and symptoms.

We have new social media pages! Make sure to follow our new Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and Threads accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. Thanks for listening!

Facebook: Informatics in the Round

Twitter: @infointhernd

TikTok: @informaticsintheround

Instagram: @infointheround

Threads: @infointheround

Website: https://www.kevinbjohnsonmd.net/podcast

This episode is going to introduce the concepts of health equity and biomedical informatics. We'll revisit this theme multiple times in 2023 but ST and I wanted to kick off the year with this overview that will also serve to provide a framework for some of what we will be discussing as we revisit this theme. We are really lucky to have two guests, both of whom are great colleagues and friends, whose careers have focused on this topic from two very different disciplines.

Lea Davis Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Division of Genetic Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her work explores the genomic architecture of complex traits, defined as the type, frequency, and function of DNA variants en masse that contribute to the genetic predisposition of a given trait.

Consuelo H. Wilkins, MD, MCSI, is a nationally recognized physician-scientist leader in health equity research focused on integrating social, cultural, and environmental factors into clinical and translational research. Dr. Wilkins is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine within the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is Senior Vice President, Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence, VUMC; and Senior Associate Dean, Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

 We also welcome back The Daily Fare Northern-born songwriters Alissa Abeler and Hannah Smith who’ve joined creative forces to form a musical duo with a unique sound and look for Nashville performers. The pair grew up on opposite sides of the music world with influences ranging from Judy Garland and Adele to Beethoven and Bach, with a healthy dose of Broadway, punk cabaret, and 80s ballads sprinkled in the mix.  They also share a story common with many newish groups breaking into the music biz that makes the topic of today one they relate to in ways you’ll readily appreciate.

St and I tried to keep this at high level, but we also weren’t afraid to push our friends to explain some difficult concepts. It was as important a discussion as it was enlightening and engaging, and I’m glad to be able to share it with the world. 

This episode, ST and I cover one of the hottest non-COVID topics in healthcare today.  We strike at the heart of clinician burnout and in particular issues related to unnecessary documentation.

Our guests today were discovered by Sam Butler from Epic, who invited them to present their incredible work at a national meeting where I was an attendee. I  thought this was work that needed to get noticed as quickly as possible. And so we decided to develop this podcast to discuss what they’ve been doing.

Dr. Heidi Twedt is Associate Chief Medical Information Officer, UW Health, and Clinical Professor of the division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Dr. Peter Kleinschmidt is the Medical Informatics Director of Quality and Safety and Assistant Professor in the division of General Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin.

The two of them have developed an entire program dedicated to reducing the length and complexity of physician documentation.  As they tell us during the episode, it's simple to implement technically, but, as one might imagine, very challenging to make "sticky" from a change management perspective. 

By the way, here's a link to a presentation by Heidi and Peter for those who want to hear more about this.