Center for
Discovery Science and Health Informatics
College of Health and Human Services and Provost Office
Health Services Research Unit
The Health Services Research Unit develops practical methods and maintains tools for facilitating research on the acquisition, visualization, and application of medical knowledge in healthcare. These methods and tools aim at aiding researchers in analyzing medical data, helping physicians in processes of diagnosing and treating diseases, and discovering knowledge useful for maintaining healthy life styles and preventing diseases.
The Unit is concerned with problems of automated discovery or enhancement
of medical knowledge by analyzing the available bodies of medical data
(large or small), with the general objective of improving the quality and
efficiency of healthcare. In particular, it applies the existing methods
and computer software, or develops new methods to model diseases, discover
patterns in medical records, improve the reliability of medical tests,
etc. The methods used stress the importance of representing the discovered
medical knowledge in the forms that are easy to understand by medical
experts, and easy to use for building mental models that support medical
decision making.
A major component of these efforts is the development and application of methods for creating quantitative and qualitative models of the relationships between diseases, life styles, and genetic predispositions, by analyzing available medical databases and reasoning with existing medical knowledge.
The ultimate goal of this research is to contribute to the improvement of the quality and safety of healthcare, and to the prevention of diseases.