More than 80 UNMC College of Medicine faculty and other guests attended a the college’s Octrober research retreat. The event was held in conjunction with the Biomedical Research and Healthcare Informatics Conference held by the college, the Great Plains IDeA-CTR and the Center for Intelligent Health Care.
In addition to the research retreat, the conference included the sixth annual Great Plains IDeA-CTR scientific meeting and the UNMC Center for Intelligent Health Care Digital Health Conference.
Howard Fox, MD, PhD, the college of medicine’s senior associate dean for research and development, said an emphasis for the hybrid conference was the use of informatics in medical research.
“One focus of the event was how to integrate all the data we are getting from health care organizations and various groups that aggregate health data and insurance data,” Dr. Fox said. “How can we best use it to discover more about the diseases or conditions we’re seeing, how they are being effectively treated and exploring the possible use of new techniques, such as genomic sequencing.”
As part of that discussion, the event hosted a virtual presentation by Robert Califf, MD, commissioner of food and drugs for the Food and Drug Administration, on “The FDA in the Era of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Precision Medicine: The Challenges and Opportunities Ahead.”
Informatics is “a growing need – both general medical informatics and bioinformatics – as we explore the use of a whole range of health data to support our academic and clinical operations,” Dr. Fox said. “We have all this data. How are we using it? How do we get it into a format that people can analyze easily?”
The two-day event also featured other presentations, including a virtual research poster presentation and talks by several UNMC researchers. New York Times best-selling author Lydia Kang, MD, an assistant professor in the UNMC Department of Internal Medicine, also gave a presentation on science writing for the public.
Dr. Fox said he hopes to hold the event in person this year.
“It drives interaction, especially with the poster presentations.”