Regenstrief Institute investigator Shaun Grannis M.D., M.S., associate professor of family medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has been inducted as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. He joins a select elected group of individuals who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of biomedical informatics.
Dr. Grannis, an internationally recognized expert in informatics and biosurveillance, directs the multidisciplinary Indiana Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, one of only four such Centers for Disease Control-funded centers in the nation.
He has developed methods to protect the privacy and confidentiality of health information used for public health syndromic surveillance. He is project director for an ongoing initiative integrating data flows from over 120 hospitals across Indiana for use in public health disease surveillance and clinical research. For the past eight years, this 24/7 system has received real-time data from participating hospitals amounting to more than 2 million transactions per year, and has detected public health outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness and carbon monoxide poisoning and monitored influenza and other diseases across Indiana.
"With the Regenstrief Institute's decades of expertise in informatics, plus input from the CDC and the Indiana State Department of Health, we are developing truly novel ways to improve the health of our state and eventually the nation," Dr. Grannis said.