1. About

Who We Are

The Health Informatics Institute (HII) is comprised of approximately 150 members consisting of biostatisticians and bioinformaticians; epidemiologists; software, data, and systems engineers; solution and data architects; laboratory and clinical research administrators; and administrative staff.

Established in 2004 as the Pediatric Epidemiology Center, the annual budget of the institute currently exceeds $50 million, primarily in NIH funding.

Faculty areas of expertise include biostatistics applied to pre-clinical, clinical, observational, and population health research; biomedical and clinical informatics; and statistical genetics and genomics.

Members are engaged in research focused on the prevention of diabetes and other autoimmune diseases, cancer prevention and control, genetic disorders, and an expanding list of rare diseases.

Our Goals

  • Ensure that research studies will have a sound scientific and statistical bases by providing the appropriate scientific and technical guidance to faculty, staff, trainees, and collaborators.
  • Improve research efforts on many different diseases.
  • Facilitate the efficient integration of research and practice by translating research into improved patient care and health outcomes.

Our Mission

Establish and maintain expertise in biomedical science, statistics, clinical trial and study design and coordination, software and data engineering, big data and high performance computing, and integrative bioinformatics.

Ongoing functions of the HII in support of this mission include the following:

  • coordinate and conduct clinical trials and health services research, including protocol development, oversight and monitoring of clinical centers, and interaction with sponsors;
  • design, develop, and maintain applications, complex databases (structured and unstructured), analysis data warehouses, and data governance policies that accommodate the full data lifecycle needs of clinical research;
  • provide and maintain comprehensive and customized reporting services for clinical operations;
  • provide scientific guidance to investigators on research study design, statistical methodology, and data management, data analysis, and data interpretation;
  • collaborate with research laboratories and analytical partners in the design, development, evaluation, implementation, and maintenance of analysis software pipelines; and
  • offer a suite of data sharing platforms and interfaces.