A recently announced University of Maryland Institute for Health Informatics will seek to leverage advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and informatics to create a learning healthcare system that assesses both Anonymized and secure digitized medical health data to diagnose, prevent and treat disease in patients across the state of Maryland.
The Institute is the result of a partnership between the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), in conjunction with the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) and the county of Montgomery, Md.
In a statement, Maryland University System Chancellor Jay Perman, MD, said the biomedical triumvirate of UMB’s top-ranked health science professional schools; College Park’s leading expertise in artificial intelligence, virtual reality and machine learning; and the UMMS, which serves more than 5 million patients, all linked by electronic health records, is an indication of great things on the horizon in healthcare innovation.
The Institute “brings together the deep expertise of the University of Maryland in advanced computing and the equally deep expertise of UMB and UMMS in human health,” Perman said. “When you combine the first – advanced computing – with the second – our health – it’s a wonderful thing.”
The Institute will use machine learning to study emerging diseases and help establish precision patient care to halt disease progression. For example, poorly controlled diabetes, high blood pressure, risk of opioid overdose, and early kidney disease can be identified by trend changes in laboratory tests in outpatients, allowing targeted interventions to prevent disease progression.
Mohan Suntha, MD, MBA, President and CEO of UMMS said he was proud of the partnership the system’s 12 affiliate hospitals have within the University Health System. “As we provide care today, we take responsibility for educating future healthcare workers,” he said in a statement. “We do this through a partnership and so when I look around today I’m incredibly excited about the partners sitting down together to make this announcement,” he continued.
The Institute hopes to catalyze a clinical data science ecosystem at North Bethesda that attracts FDA and NIH investigators, UMB and UMCP faculty, educational programs and medical bioinformatics students, and partners industry, enabling the expansion of “dry” computer labs, virtual meeting rooms and classrooms. .
The Institute is expected to open in leased space in early 2023, with final completion of labs and offices at the North Bethesda Metro site in 2028. Initial funding of $25 million is provided by the partnership University of Maryland Strategy: Empowering the State (MPower). The Montgomery County government will provide an additional $40 million to develop the North Bethesda site.
In addition to the new institute, the University of Maryland System of Medicine announced last year that it was partnering with health technology company Vibrent Health to create the All of Maryland Precision Health initiative, a statewide digital platform for studies examining how genes and other factors affect health. .
The mission of All of Maryland – a study led by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) – is to discover better ways to individualize health care. The objective is to enable individuals to benefit from treatments adapted to their own health profile.
This data-driven study aims to recruit up to 250,000 volunteers across Maryland to identify and better understand the health needs of Marylanders by region and community. Particular emphasis will be placed on underserved populations who experience significant health disparities, leading to more disease and shorter lifespans. The large-scale effort to collect broad sources of health data, including genetic information, will help researchers better understand human genomic variation and its relationship to disease and treatment.
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