The Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP), founded in 1994, is a multidisciplinary applied research and education program. Our faculty advance the science of biomedical informatics for molecular characterization of the patient, gene discovery, medical decision making, diagnosis, therapeutic selection, care redesign, public health management, population health, and re-imagined clinical trials. Biomedical informatics has become a major theme and methodology for biomedical science, health care delivery, and population health, involving high-dimensional modeling and understanding of patients from the molecular to the population levels. The field is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional biomedical disciplines, the science and technology of computing, data science, biostatistics, epidemiology, decision theory, omics, implementation science, and health care policy and management. CHIP faculty are trained in medicine, data science, computer science, mathematics and epidemiology. Though CHIP has a robust pediatric research agenda, our contributions span across all ages. CHIP is a collaborating program with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.

The Program’s innovations have transformed the landscape of big data in health care, the use of AI in clinical decision making, and the IT strategies of commercial enterprises. CHIP discoveries and inventions have been widely adopted by technology companies such as: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Leading projects include the SMART on FHIR “app store for health”, the cTAKES pipeline for computerized “reading” of clinical text, the HealthMap global surveillance system, the VaccineFinder tool to help the public locate COVID-19 vaccines, and the federated data sharing Genomic Information Commons.

CHIP software is reading millions of doctors’ notes across sites of care and surfacing key insights about adverse medication effects. CHIP research has strongly influenced public policy from vaccine recommendations to health IT provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act to paradigm shifts in data provisioning by CMS. CHIP’s biosurveillance computational platforms have found the earliest signals of Ebola outbreaks. On the basis of these advances, Health 2.0 voted Boston Children's Hospital the 10 Year Global Retrospective Top Influencer among all health care organizations.

Publications

Keloth VK, Banda JM, Gurley M, Heider PM, Kennedy G, Liu H, Liu F, Miller T, Natarajan K, V Patterson O, Peng Y, Raja K, Reeves RM, Rouhizadeh M, Shi J, Wang X, Wang Y, Wei WQ, Williams AE, Zhang R, Belenkaya R, Reich C, Blacketer C, Ryan P, Hripcsak G, Elhadad N, Xu H. Representing and Utilizing Clinical Textual Data for Real World Studies: An OHDSI Approach. Journal of biomedical informatics 2023.

Toce MS, Michelson KA, Hudgins JD, Olson KL, Monuteaux MC, Bourgeois FT. Association of prescription drug monitoring programs with benzodiazepine prescription dispensation and overdose in adolescents and young adults. Clinical toxicology (Philadelphia, Pa.) 2023.

Brown T, de Salazar Munoz PM, Bhatia A, Bunda B, Williams EK, Bor D, Miller JS, Mohareb A, Thierauf J, Yang W, Villalba J, Naranbai V, Garcia Beltran W, Miller TE, Kress D, Stelljes K, Johnson K, Larremore D, Lennerz J, Iafrate AJ, Balsari S, Buckee C, Grad Y. Geographically skewed recruitment and COVID-19 seroprevalence estimates: a cross-sectional serosurveillance study and mathematical modelling analysis. BMJ open 2023.

El-Hayek C, Barzegar S, Faux N, Doyle K, Pillai P, Mutch SJ, Vaisey A, Ward R, Sanci L, Dunn AG, Hellard ME, Hocking JS, Verspoor K, Boyle DI. An evaluation of existing text de-identification tools for use with patient progress notes from Australian general practice. International journal of medical informatics 2023.

Patik I, Redhu NS, Eran A, Bao B, Nandy A, Tang Y, El Sayed S, Shen Z, Glickman J, Fox JG, Snapper SB, Horwitz BH. The IL-10 receptor inhibits cell extrinsic signals necessary for STAT1-dependent macrophage accumulation during colitis. Mucosal immunology 2023.