New project secures NIH funding to address chronic health disparities

New project secures NIH funding to address chronic health disparities

Chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Of the 45 percent of Americans who suffer from one or more chronic illnesses, underserved populations are three to six times more likely to have a chronic illness than whites.

Researchers at Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine, in collaboration with the Caridad Center, Inc. and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, have received a $500,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project to address chronic health disparities through the use of electronic health records (EHRs). Intelligence, machine learning (AI/ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The project, “Developing a Precise, Localized, Community Focused, Population Health Framework in an FQHC to Tackle Chronic Disease Disparities through EHR Data,” is part of the NIH’s Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM). -IN ADVANCE)." This project is made possible by NIH Other Transaction Agreement Number 1OT2OD032581.

AIM-AHEAD's program goal is to build mutually beneficial, coordinated, and trusted partnerships to increase the participation and representation of researchers and communities currently underrepresented in AI/ML model development and to advance the capabilities of this emerging technology, starting with the use of EHR and expanding to other disparate data, to address health disparities.

The AIM-AHEAD program consists of four cores: partnerships, research, infrastructure and data science education – and these collaborations fall under the infrastructure core, which is led by Nick Tsinoremas, Ph.D., vice provost for research, data and informatics at the University of Miami and founding director of the Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) as principal researcher active.

A major recurring challenge for organizations seeking to use their own institutional EHR data for research is creating an appropriate research environment in which the patient population can be profiled and research cohorts identified. Addressing this challenge is the first necessary step to enable community-focused, EHR-based research projects aimed at applying AI/ML or other methodologies to these data sets.

FAU's Schmidt College of Medicine and its affiliated health clinics, along with Caridad Health Center - Florida's largest free health clinic founded in 1989 - and the University of Miami, are developing this pilot program as a national model for implementing AI/ML in community health centers and federally qualified health centers to support their AI/ML deployment and research activities improve.

Little has been done to actively integrate data from electronic health records from federally qualified health centers and community centers that provide direct care to underrepresented and disadvantaged groups burdened by health disparities. Unfortunately, while these centers serve as a primary source of medical care for communities affected by health disparities, they lack sufficient data, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities necessary to collect, compile and analyze significant amounts of patient data.”

Janet Robishaw, Ph.D., principal investigator, chair of the Department of Biomedical Sciences, associate dean for research and professor of Biomedical Sciences at the FAU Schmidt College of Medicine

The project is led by Robishaw; Laura Kallus, executive director of Caridad Center, Inc.; and Azizi Seixas, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Miller School of Medicine and director of the Population Health Informatics Program at IDSC.

With this grant, researchers will address these health disparities challenges by implementing a research tool developed by the University of Miami with funding from the NIH's Clinical and Translational Science Award Program. The University Research Informatics Data Environment, also known as URIDE, is a web-based platform that aggregates and visualizes anonymized data from multiple clinical healthcare systems within the organization. URIDE allows clinical researchers and their teams to easily explore demographics, diagnoses, procedures, vital signs, medications, labs, notes, allergies, comorbidities and other information.

URIDE previously received funding from the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award program. This new pilot program will increase the use of URIDE through a much broader expansion of the use of this cyber infrastructure platform.

“We are excited to collaborate with FAU and Caridad to expand the URIDE platform and create a more representative community with this cutting-edge health informatics tool,” said Tsinoremas.

The project team will establish a research environment to support the identification of research cohorts. With URIDE and the integration of AI/ML and IoT, they will be able to perform remote health monitoring. Patients with cardiometabolic health conditions such as hypertension and diabetes are monitored remotely, allowing Caridad Center to implement a customized AI/ML query and analytics platform into its EHR and conduct personalized queries in its research questions to address chronic diseases in their patient population.

“As a community medical school and for the community, we are excited to collaborate with the Caridad Center and the University of Miami to bring together experts and resources to advance the goals of the National Institutes of Health’s AIM-AHEAD program.” said Julie Pilitsis, M.D., Ph.D., dean and vice president for medical affairs, Schmidt College of Medicine. “AI and machine learning are powerful tools that will help us optimize healthcare delivery and drive innovation in healthcare.”

Source:

Florida Atlantic University

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