OSU’s Center for Health Systems Innovation to collaborate on Big Data Spoke grant
Friday, October 5, 2018
Oklahoma State University’s Center for Health Systems Innovation (CHSI), a joint venture between the OSU Spears School of Business and the OSU Center for Health Sciences, will be collaborating with four other universities as part of a Big Data Spoke (BD Spoke) grant funded by the National Science Foundation.
The BD Spoke program is designed to promote the use of biological and clinical data by both scientific and educational communities to address significant data challenges. The three priority areas are data science education and workforce development, community engagement, diversity and partnership, and health and biology. OSU is a collaborator on the project working alongside the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Tuskegee University, Spelman College and West Virginia University and several other collaborators.
“Big data have transformed the life and health sciences into computationally-intensive research fields, yet access to and usage of big data in biological and clinical research and education has not kept pace,” said Dr. William D. Paiva, executive director of CHSI. “This innovative collaboration hopes to overcome those hurdles so we can continue to address our most vexing health care challenges through data.”
CHSI’s contribution to the project is the use of data from electronic health records. CHSI is also set to provide two instructors – Dr. Dursun Delen, Regents Professor and Patterson Foundation Chair in Management Science and Information Systems at Spears Business, and Elvena Fong, health data analytics program manager for CHSI – for a proposed workshop on the electronic health records system to take place at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in July 2019.
“In my career, I have seen a rapid explosion of biological and clinical data,” Fong said. “The ability to create actionable insights out of data is critical if we are going to realize the value from the large investments we have made in collecting these types of data over the last decade. The Institute for Predictive Medicine within OSU’s Center for Health Systems Innovation has a stated mission to ‘transform health data into actionable insights.’”