Dr. Leo Celi, Keynote Speaker
Leo Anthony Celi MD MS MPH is an internist, an intensivist, and an infectious disease specialist, who has practiced medicine in 3 continents, giving him broad perspectives in healthcare delivery. In addition, he pursued a master’s degree in biomedical informatics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a master’s degree in public health at Harvard University. The focus of his research is on secondary use of clinical data for quality improvement. As the Clinical Research Director of the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at MIT, he brings together teams of clinicians, data scientists, biostatisticians and epidemiologists from academia and industry to operationalize a learning system around the MIMIC database. The learning system aggregates and analyzes day-to-day “experiments” as captured by electronic health records. Clinical databases provide a unique opportunity to unravel heterogeneity of treatment effect, and evaluate practice variation and the impact of diagnostic and treatment decisions on patient outcomes.
He directs an organization called Sana (sana.mit.edu) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) here at MIT. It is a cross-disciplinary organization consisting of doctors, engineers, public health practitioners, informaticians, and social entrepreneurs, among others. At its core is an open-source mobile tele-health platform that allows for capture, transmission and archiving of complex medical data (e.g. images, videos, physiologic signals such as ECG, EEG and oto-acoustic emission responses), in addition to patient demographic and clinical information. Sana initiates the design process with the identification of a clinical need by committed international partners, which include universities, NGOs, governments, and private ventures, with strong emphasis on local stakeholders. Sana runs a course on innovations in global health informatics that focuses on the design, implementation, evaluation and scale-up of health information systems in resource-poor settings. The goal is to incubate innovations within its partner universities, while learning from and creating best practices in capacity building. The partners are not merely sources of specifications and feedback, but active participants in the co-creation of systems design at the highest level. Sana believes geniuses abound in its partner countries, and these geniuses are more likely to develop sustainable and scalable solutions as they understand the problems better. The course, free of charge and available online, currently has over 500 students from around the world, including Colombia, the Philippines, India, Tunisia, Brazil, Uganda and Taiwan.
Finally, Dr. Celi holds a faculty position at Harvard Medical School as an intensivist at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Dr. Patricia García, Keynote Speaker
Dr. Patricia García is the Dean of the School of Public Health and Administration at Peru’s Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia (UPCH) in Lima. Her research interests include drug and vaccine development, and health systems strengthening and human resources. She has contributed to the Peru ICOHRTA Network for AIDS/TB Research Training project, as well as the QUIPU Health Informatics Research Training Program, both in Peru. Dr. García earned her Masters of Public Health from the University of Washington and her MD from UPCH.
Dr. Lucila Ohno-Machado, Keynote Speaker
Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD is Associate Dean for Informatics and Technology at the School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, founding chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics and Professor of Medicine. She received her medical degree from the University of São Paulo and her doctoral degree in medical information sciences and computer science from Stanford University. She leads a group of biomedical informatics faculty with diverse backgrounds in biomedicine, and quantitative sciences. Prior to her current position, she was faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School and at the MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and former director of its informatics training program. Dr. Ohno-Machado is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and of the American College of Medical Informatics, American Society for Clinical Investigation, and Editor-In-Chief for the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She is past chair of the scientific program committee for the AMIA Annual Symposium and has served in review boards for NIH and other funding agencies.