In Memoriam: Dr. Homer R. Warner, 1922 - 2012

We at the Homer Warner Center for Informatics Research are saddened at the passing of Dr. Homer R. Warner, our founder, our mentor, our colleague, and our friend. Dr. Warner passed away in Salt Lake City on November 30, 2012 due to complications of pancreatitis.

The groundbreaking work done by Dr. Warner and his team in the use of computers in medicine led to the creation of one of the first computer-based electronic medical record systems in the world, Intermountain Healthcare's HELP system, which is still in use today. Dr. Warner also established the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, where many team members of the Homer Warner Center are currently serving as faculty members and graduate students.

Dr. Warner's unassuming style, inquisitive and generous nature, and brilliant mind have been and will continue to be an inspiration to all of us here at the Homer Warner Center. He will be greatly missed.

Dr. Warner's obituary is here: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/saltlaketribune/obituary.aspx?n=homer-richards-warner&pid=161365650.

Our thoughts are with all members of Dr. Warner's family.



Bust of Dr. Homer Warner located at the
Homer Warner Center in Salt Lake City, Utah



HWCIR Receives "Best Hospital IT Department" Honor for Second Year in a Row

The HWCIR is honored to be the recipient of Healthcare IT News' "Best Hospital IT Department" award: http://www.healthcareitnews.com/best-hospitals-2012/intermountain-claims-top-spot-second-year-row.

It's our second year in a row that we've received this award. We appreciate this great honor and hope to continue to provide outstanding service to the clinicians and patients of Intermountain Healthcare as well as a great workplace for our team.

New Clinical Element Model Browser Now Available


Research engineers and medical informaticists at the HWCIR have created a new Clinical Element Model (CEM) browser. The CEM browser shows graphical, CDL (Constraint Definition Language) and XSD (XML schema definition) views of the Intermountain Healthcare/GE Healthcare Caradigm Clinical Element Models. The CEM browser is now available for use at www.clinicalelement.com.

Four folders (or releases) of CEMs are available at the site:

• Active, consisting of models currently in use by a product/project (currently, two products/projects are using CEMs – the GE/Caradigm product, and the SHARP grant project)
• Proposed, consisting of models not yet in use by a product/project
• Caradigm, consisting of models in use by the GE/Caradigm product
• SHARP, consisting of models in use by the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Project

A user guide is also available at http://www.clinicalelement.com/UserGuide.pdf.

Future enhancements and monthly releases are planned. Please send any comments, questions or feedback about the CEM browser to modeling@imail.org.

CDL view in CEM browser

Tree view in CEM browser

IT Solutions for Intermountain BioRepository

The HWCIR is helping the Intermountain Healthcare BioRepository team with innovative IT solutions to assist with biospecimen analysis, tracking, annotation, and inventory management.

The BioRespository team, located on the Intermountain LDS Hospital campus in Salt Lake City, Utah, has one of the largest repositories of paraffin tissue blocks in the Western United States. Cancer researchers have been able to use the tissue blocks collected at Intermountain over the last 25 years to evaluate for genetic aberrations which may play a role in cancer development or predisposistion. The BioRepository team also has the ability to safely store and track fresh frozen tissue samples. DNA and RNA extracted from the fresh frozen tissue samples are helping clinicians and researchers analyze genetic profiles of many diseases and the phenotypic outcomes of diseased tissue.

Paraffin tissue block

Informaticists and software engineers from the HWCIR have supplied the BioRepository team with tools to assist in consent tracking and clinical study data capture. In conjunction with the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) community, the HWCIR has also provided the implementation and training of caBIG’s caTissue Suite, an open-source biorespository software tracking tool used to manage the collection, storage, and supervision of biospecimens.

SIIM 2012

The HWCIR recently participated in a conference presented by the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). The SIIM 2012 Annual Meeting was held June 7-10, 2012 in Orlando, Florida (http://www.siim2012.org/).

Presenting at the meeting was Jeffrey Ferraro, PhD, from the HWCIR. Jeffrey, along with Scott DuVall, PhD, from the University of Utah School of Medicine, led a presentation, demonstration and discussion entitled "Practical Natural Language Processing -- Harvesting the Low Hanging Fruit." The session, designed specifically for radiologists, administrators and researchers, covered the capabilities and limitations of Natural Language Processing (NLP) on radiology reports and other clinical documents. They discussed and demonstrated available methods for extracting information from reports, mapping concepts to standards, and using text as input to statistical and machine learning models.

SIIM is dedicated to the advancement of medical imaging informatics through both research and education. More information about SIIM can be found on their website at http://www.siim.org/.

New Ways to Connect with HWCIR

The Homer Warner Center is now on Facebook and Twitter.

Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/hwcir.

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hwcir.

Care Connectivity Consortium IT Workgroup

The HWCIR was the host site for meetings this week with the IT workgroup of the Care Connectivity Consortium (CCC). During the week, the CCC IT workgroup continued their efforts to provide enhanced data sharing capabilities among different healthcare providers and patients.

The HWCIR and Intermountain Healthcare are proud to participate in the CCC. The Consortium's mission is to create methods to safely and securely exchange patient health information among disparate electronic health record systems across the United States. Formed in 2011, the CCC consists of Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger Health System (based in Pennsylvania), Group Health Cooperative (based in Washington), Kaiser Permanente (based in California) and Mayo Clinic (based in Minnesota). All five organizations currently participating in the CCC share the belief that electronic medical information is one of the most important care support tools available in healthcare today.

Interconnected Health 2012 Conference

Two members of the HWCIR team presented this week at the Interconnected Health 2012 conference held April 2-4 near Chicago, Illinois. Jason Gagner, MBA, assistant director, along with Sid Thornton, PhD, senior medical informaticist, made a presentation entitled "Getting Data to Flow: Overcoming Current False Negative Limitations of Trait Matching in a Health Information Exchange (HIE)." Les Westberg, principal architect for Agilex Technologies, also participated in the presentation.



Web banner for the Interconnected Health 2012 conference held April 2-4, 2012

The presentation focused on the complexities of matching patients across organizations and the work that Intermountain Healthcare is doing with several exchange initiatives to implement a sustainable HIE that is compatible with the Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) specifications.

The slide deck from the presentation will be available shortly on the soon-to-be-unveiled Homer Warner Center for Informatics Research website.

The Interconnected Health 2012 conference was presented by the Object Management Group (OMG), Health Level Seven International (HL7), Open Health Tools and HIMSS. Designed for the CxO audience, this year's conference theme was "Enabling Health through High-Impact IT." Sub-tracks were also available with a focus on Clinical Decision Support, Clinical Vocabulary and Terminology, Service-Oriented Architecture, Mobile Health, Enterprise Architecture, the Role of Open Source in Health IT, Devices, and Health Information Exchange. For more information about the Interconnected Health conference, visit their website at http://www.interconnected-health.org/.

Visit from Dr. Donald Lindberg

The HWCIR was honored today to have a visit from Donald A.B. Lindberg, MD, director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. A reception and luncheon were held at the HWCIR offices at the Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah.

Dr. Lindberg is truly a luminary in the medical informatics profession. He has been a pioneer in applying computer technology to healthcare for over five decades. Prior to his appointment at the U.S. National Library of Medicine in 1984, he was a professor of information science and a professor of pathology at the University of Missouri. He was elected the first president of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He has also served on the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Board of Medical Examiners, and the Council of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. More information about Dr. Lindberg is available at the U.S. National Library of Medicine website.

In attendance today were Dr. Homer R. Warner, HWCIR executive director Dr. Peter Haug, Intermountain Healthcare pulmonologist Dr. Alan H. Morris, and medical informaticists and staff members from the HWCIR.

Photos by Rudy Van Bree.

In Memoriam

The HWCIR lost a dear friend and colleague this week. Carr Smith, PhD, died on March 18, 2012 after suffering a massive heart attack two days prior. Dr. Smith, one of our medical informaticists, had been serving as the executive director of Intermountain Healthcare's software development alliance with GE Healthcare at the time of his death.

Carr and Koralie Smith at the HWCIR grand opening event
February 2011
Photo by Rudy Van Bree

Dr. Smith trained at Intermountain LDS Hospital and at the University of Utah where he earned his PhD in Medical Informatics. Prior to joining Intermountain Healthcare in 2005, Dr. Smith worked in a variety of product management and product strategy roles for Eclipsys Corporation, IDX System Corporation, and EMTEK Healthcare Systems.

We love Carr and will greatly miss his intellect, astuteness, humor, kindness and leadership. Our thoughts and prayers go to Carr's wife Koralie and to their family. Funeral services will be held Saturday, March 24, 2012 in Kaysville, Utah. The Smith family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the T. Alan Pryor Scholarship Fund at the following website: http://medicine.utah.edu/bmi/scholarship/pryor/index.htm.

Scholarship donation checks may also be sent to:

The University of Utah

Department of Biomedical Informatics

Attn: Susan Krantz, Department Manager

26 South 2000 East, Suite 5775

Salt Lake City, UT 84112-5750