UTHealth receives $7.3M grant

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth) School of Biomedical Informatics has obtained a $7.3 million grant to enhance healthcare and biomedical discovery through health IT.

Using the grant, the school will develop ways to mine medical data for information that could lead to better treatments and to making medical records more readily available to caregivers. Seven grants have been awarded to five principal researchers since June 1, according to a release.

Hua Xu, PhD, associate professor and holder of the Robert H. Graham Professorship in Entrepreneurial Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering at UTHealth, was awarded grants to enhance the use of medical records in research totaling approximately $4.3 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Library of Medicine and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

His team is developing novel interactive machine learning algorithms and software for biomedical text processing problems.

Assistant Professor Cui Tao, PhD, was awarded a $1.4 million grant from the National Library of Medicine to develop a software program to make EHRs more user-friendly for clinicians. “Some systems may store these patient notes in different places. We’re developing a system that will automatically put this information together,” he said.

Associate Professor Yang Gong, MD, PhD, was awarded $1.2 million for patient safety research by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Utilizing a user-centered, learning-supportive and ontological approach combined with case-based reasoning and natural language processing techniques, Gong’s team is developing a knowledge base and learning toolkit that can systematically collect and analyze incident reports.

In addition:

  • School of Biomedical Informatics Professor James Langabeer II, PhD, MBA, EMT, was awarded a $240,000 grant from the American Heart Association for a Phase 2 study working to enhance the care of heart disease.
  • Associate Professor Trevor Cohen, MD, PhD, received a $160,000 grant from the National Library of Medicine to contribute to the development of the Data Discovery Index Coordination Consortium.

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