MUCMD Symposium to be held at The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles

On August 16 and 17, the 3^rd annual Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD) Symposium is returning to The Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Once again, program director Randall Wetzel, MD, along with a committee of representatives from nationally recognized companies and universities, has organized an interactive forum to tackle the "Big Data Revolution" as it applies to medicine.

Following the lead of communication and commerce, healthcare has catapulted into the digital age. The implementation of electronic health care records (EHRs) has allowed thousands of physicians to log their clinical observations on a daily basis. With a few keystrokes, individual cases of diagnosis, course of treatment and patient outcomes are recorded into an extensive data network. However, when searching for ways to improve medical processes and interactions, this collection of digital data is often overlooked.

With the goal of analyzing this wealth of information, the MUCMD Symposium was inaugurated three years ago by Dr. Randall Wetzel, chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The symposium introduces physicians and researchers to "big data" experts such as computer scientists, engineers and statisticians. Together, this multidisciplinary team searches for relationships among documented clinical experiences that will guide innovation and research, and ultimately revolutionize the way healthcare professionals care for patients.

This year's program includes: Eric Baldeschwieler from Apache™ Hadoop®, Zhiyong Lu from the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, Eva Lee from the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and HealthCare and other industry-based scientists. The Symposium also includes speakers from Johns Hopkins University, IBM, Vanderbilt University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology.

Presentations will focus on data-driven healthcare, crowdsourcing statistics, machine learning-guided decision support, the role of "big" data in pathology, and the electronic health record in autism treatment/diagnosis. As it has in previous years, the symposium will offer poster sessions, predictive modeling competitions, oral presentations and ample time for brainstorming and discussion.