Well, here we are—the final episode of Informatics in the Round (we think!). After five incredible years, 38 episodes, and thousands of listeners, we’ve decided it’s time to wrap up this journey. But first, we’re taking a minute (or maybe two hours) to reflect on this wild ride—and we’ve brought some people you might recognize!

In this episode, we pull some clips from the archive to help us look back at our best moments, favorite topics, and silliest slip-ups over the years. We take you through our “Top 5” topics that we loved to talk about the most: electronic health records, patient privacy, public health, health equity, and AI. We will also share some stories you didn’t hear (like that time we forgot to hit records—oops), how the pandemic reshaped our personal and professional lives, and the lessons that will stick with us.

To lead us through our Top 5, we invited back some of our favorite guests to reflect and discuss the future of the field: 

Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, MD, MPH, MS, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center whose research focuses on documentation in healthcare communication.

Dr. Ellen Wright Clayton, JD, MD, is a professor of Pediatrics, Law, and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University Law School and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Her research focuses on the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics research.

Dr. Melissa McPheeters, PhD, MPH, is the Senior Director for Analytics at RTI International, as well as an esteemed epidemiologist and public health informatician. Her work focuses on building interdisciplinary teams to address complex problems across health, public health, and data modernization processes.

Dr. Consuelo H. Wilkins, MD, is the Senior Vice President and Senior Associate Dean of Health Equity at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Associate Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Her work attempts to bring together community stakeholders and create collaboration initiatives to improve community health and biomedical research.

Dr. Chris Callison-Burch, PhD, MS, is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on natural language processing and generative AI.

So, is this really goodbye? Maybe, maybe not. We can never sit still for long. But for now, let’s raise a glass, share a few laughs, and remember the good ol’ times!

We can’t leave without saying thank you to all of you for being part of the ride, for listening to us on your jog or your commute, and for engaging critically with all we’ve had to say. It’s been an honor.

Thank you to all the guests who have joined us throughout the last five years. Thank you for contributing your expertise, your lived experiences, and your unfiltered thoughts. Thank you to the musicians who bravely stepped into conversations about topics they knew little about and for offering up their questions. You ensured we spoke to everyone, and your music said the rest of what our words couldn’t convey. To all our guests, your generosity with your time and your knowledge is what made this podcast what it was.

Our mission was always to make informatics intelligible so that you and all your friends and family can engage confidently with the topic. We hope you now have the language to feel empowered navigating this crazy, awesome, flawed, fascinating healthcare system. 

For now, this is Kevin Johnson, Harris Bland, and Ellie Shuert signing off!

Mentioned in the episode:

-Hidden Brain podcast

-Scott Scovill and Moo TV, plus his appearance on episode 4: “Automated Resilience: Biomedical Informatics as a Safety Net for Life”

-Nancy Lorenzi in “Informatics and Anti-Black Racism: What We Need to Do” (Jun. 2020)

-Trent Rosenbloom in “21st Century Cures: Curing our Anxiety or Causing It?” (May 2021)

-Hey Epic!

-Brad Malin in “Data Privacy: Possible, Impossible, or Somewhere In Between?” (Aug. 2020)

-Moore v. Regents of the University of California (1990)

-”Learning Health Care and the Obligation to Participate in Research” by Ruth R. Faden and Nancy E. Kass (Hastings Center Report)

-”The Right to Privacy” by Samuel D. Warren II and Louis Brandeis (Harvard Law Review)

-Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering by Malcolm Gladwell

-Colin Walsh in “COVID and the Hidden Data Gap” (Feb. 2021)

-Bryant Thomas Karras in “Get Your Dose of Data! An Introduction to Public Health Informatics” (Jul. 2024)

-Consuelo Wilkins in “Clinical Trials: Are We Whitewashing the Data?” (Nov. 2023)

-Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? by Martin Luther King Jr.

-Michael Matheny and Tom Lasko in “AI and Medicine: The Slippery Slope to an Uncertain Future” (Feb. 2020)

-Lyle Ungar and Angela Bradbury in “Chatbots in Healthcare: The Ultimate Turing Test” (Aug. 2024)

-“A Textbook Remedy for Domain Shifts: Knowledge Priors for Medical Image Analysis” by Yue Yang, Mona Gandhi, Yufei Wang, Yifan Wu, Michael S. Yao, Chris Callison-Burch, James C. Gee, Mark Yatskar (NeurIPS)

-Google DeepMind

-OpenAI’s Deep Research

-The Thinking Game (2024) dir. by Greg Kohs

-“Dolly the Sheep: A Cautionary Tale” by Robin Feldman and Vern Norviel (Yale Journal of Law & Technology)

-Who, Me? Children’s book series

-The Influencers Substack

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What role can AI play in mental health care? Let’s talk about it! In this year's final episode of Informatics in the Round, we explore how AI can assist both patients seeking diagnoses and treatments for mental health disorders as well as therapists looking to improve their clinical practice. While AI offers exciting possibilities, we also address important concerns around data privacy, potential bias, and the need to maintain human connection in the therapeutic process. It was a fitting discussion to to wrap up our year of AI-themed episodes.

For our expert consultant, we invited Dr. Torrey Creed, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine and founder of the Penn Collaborative for CBT and Implementation Science. As an NIH-funded researcher, her work focuses on creating pragmatic and sustainable strategies to increase access to high-quality mental health care, especially in low-resourced communities. She also serves as the Senior Implementation Consultant for Lyssn.io, which leverages AI to help scale multiple aspects of clinical care.

We also welcomed back one of our favorite musicians, Jane Bach, to bring her perspective! Jane is an award-winning songwriter who has written for some of the biggest names in music, including Reba McEntire, Tammy Wynette, Collin Raye, and JoDee Messine. She was also recently inducted into the New York State Country Songwriters Hall of Fame.

We wanted to spend some time in this episode honoring our friend, Nolan Neal, who passed away in summer of 2022. Nolan was upfront about his struggles with mental health, and we want to dedicate this episode to him. Nolan, thank you for sharing your life with us through your music. We hope this episode can help serve others like you and make a contribution to providing better mental health care to all.

Mentioned in the episode:

-"Shadow of the Man I Used to Be" by Nolan Neal

-Nolan Neal on America's Got Talent

-"Already Gone" written by Jane Bach, performed by Natalia Malo

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Can AI do our jobs better than we can? Let’s test it!

You might have noticed that this episode got off to a strange start… who were those people talking anyway? That, my friends, was Google NotebookLM’s best shot at recording this very podcast. In it, two AI-generated guests conduct an ironic “deep dive” into the topic we are discussing in this episode: whether AI will come to replace certain jobs and how it will change existing jobs in our healthcare system and beyond.

For this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Marylyn Ritchie, a Professor of Genetics and the Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. An expert in translational bioinformatics, her research focuses on using clinical data to discover the genetic architecture underlying common diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease. In April, she was appointed Vice Dean of Artificial Intelligence and Computing where she works to develop and implement an AI strategy for the Penn Medicine health system.

We also finally got a songwriter back on our guest panel. Collin Frisch is an indie-pop singer-songwriter who describes himself as “like Ed Sheeran, but less talented and better looking.” After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, he took on the role of Creative Director at the Bridge Church near Trenton, New Jersey. We were so grateful that Collin could represent the right side of the brain in this conversation.

Lastly, we welcomed our co-host Harris Bland back to the show!

We turn a bit philosophical in this episode; while we discuss AI’s potential to rewire and create jobs, we also talk about the undiscovered fields of medicine where humans must still blaze the path forward. Inevitably, our conversation turned into a reflection about which characteristics AI can’t yet emulate, the very things that make us human and—for now—irreplaceable.

Mentioned in the episode:

-What eMERGE actually means: 

-”Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs?” by Emma Goldberg, New York Times, August 2024

-Waymo Stand-off video

-”Swiss cheese model” coined by Dr. James Reason in “Human Error: Models and Management,” British Medical Journal, 2000.

Songs mentioned in this episode:

“Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield (2004)

“She Bangs” by William Hung (2008) (originally performed by Ricky Martin)

“Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift (2014)

“Anti-Hero” by Taylor Swift (2022)

“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” by Taylor Swift (2024)

“All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” by Taylor Swift (2021)

“Ruin Your Heart” by Collin Frisch (2021)

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What exactly is a “learning health system”? In several of our episodes, you’ve heard us talk about how data collection has modernized through new technologies and enhanced approaches to clinical trials. But now that we have all that data, we need to transform it into clinical practice. Learning health systems are all about completing this virtuous cycle from scientific discovery to implementation, and yet, there are few that exist and work well. In this episode, you’ll hear us discuss (and perhaps debate) what a true learning health system looks like, as well as how informatics can help lead the charge.

Up first on our panel of distinguished guests is Dr. Genevieve Melton-Meaux, a Professor of Surgery and Senior Associate Dean of Health Informatics and Data Science at the University of Minnesota. Among her many accolades, she is a Past President of the American College of Medical Informatics, current President of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Director for the Center of Learning Health System Sciences at Minnesota. Her research focuses on clinical natural language processing, surgical informatics, and optimizing AI best practices.

We were also joined by Dr. Chuck Friedman, a Professor of Medical Education and Chair of the Department of Learning Health Sciences at the University of Michigan Medical School. He is also the editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Learning Health Systems. Drawing from his time at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, he helped transform Michigan’s medical education department into one of the first in the nation to focus on learning health at all levels, including large-scale information infrastructure.

Finally, we had Dr. Peter Embí, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Prior, he served as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, a not-for-profit health care research organization in Indianapolis, Indiana that seeks to develop, conduct, and disseminate scientific research across communities. A Past President of the American Medical Informatics Association, his research centers on data-driven learning health systems.

We are also pleased to share an original learning health systems “anthem,” composed by Molly Sinderbrand, called “System Problems Need System Solutions.” In our jazzy rendition, it was performed by pianist Phil Barrison and our very own Kevin Johnson on vocals! We appreciate all their contributions and are excited to feature it at the end of this episode!

Tackling a topic like this required top-notch guests, and they delivered! We hope you enjoy listening.

Links mentioned in this episode:

-Evaluation Methods in Biomedical and Health Informatics by Charles P. Friedman, Jeremy C. Wyatt, Joan S. Ash

-“Where’s the Science in Medical Informatics?” by C.P. Friedman

-Learn more about the Indiana Network for Patient Care 

-Patti Brennan’s Presentation referred to as “Care Between the Care”: “High-Reliability, Person-Centered Health Care Systems: It Can’t Happen Without the National Library of Medicine,” presented at GoldLab Symposium 2018

-“Creating Local Learning Health Systems: Thinking Globally, Act Locally” by William E. Smoyer, Peter J. Embí, Susan Moffatt-Bruce 

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, and TikTok accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd. You can find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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Live from the studio, it's Informatics in the Round! Okay, we aren't technically live, but we are bringing you an extra special episode from the Penn Engineering Online studio! Since all our guests are from the University of Pennsylvania, we thought we would sit down in-person to enjoy this lively discussion. Today we are talking all about chatbots and the future of generative AI in medicine. We discuss topics such as what chatbots are, whether they present the markers of true artificial intelligence, what innovations we are looking forward to, and the benefits and barriers to integrating them into our healthcare settings. 

First, we had Dr. Angela Bradbury, an Associate Professor of Medicine and a medical ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also founder of the Penn Telegenetics Program, a national program using telehealth and digital tools to increase access to genetic medicine. Her research program has been developing patient-centered digital tools, including chatbots, to address the use of genetics in medicine and a limited genetics workforce. As a medical ethicist, she is particularly interested in how we responsibly deploy digital tools and generative AI in medical practice to improve patient outcomes.

We also had Lyle Ungar, a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Penn. He researches the psychological dimension of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. His research group of psychologists and computer scientists study what language reveals about physical and mental well-being. They are building culturally aware chatbots for mental health support and teaching "soft skills" to high school students.

Finally, we had Chris Callison-Burch, a Professor of Computer and Information Science whose AI course at Penn has one of the highest enrollments at the university with about 750 students. His research focuses on applications of large language models to address long-standing challenges in artificial intelligence. He’s a leading expert on AI and has appeared in front of Congress as well as on many podcasts to discuss the future of generative AI and intellectual property. We are so grateful to have all these expert guests on this episode and in the room with us!

Oh, and we had a guest star hosting this episode—Ellie Shuert, our production assistant, stepped out from behind the scenes. She is freshly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English and Linguistics. Her curiosity about AI and natural language processing gave our guests lots to think about, and it was so fun to let her direct an episode.

Thank you so much to Penn Engineering Online for hosting us in your beautiful studio space! It was the perfect place to enjoy this conversation. If you are listening, we suggest maybe going over to our YouTube channel to watch us film in such a cool space!

This is truly one of our favorite episodes of the year, and we are so excited to share it with you!

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Welcome, everyone, to your introductory course in public health informatics! On today's episode, we discuss all things public health, including what it is, how it varies on a state and national level, and how health departments respond to public health crises. We demystify some of our misconceptions about how the public health system works, like how state departments are separate from the CDC, how we share disease statistics such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how our medical history may or may not travel with us from state to state. Of course, our question always is, why does informatics matter in this conversation? Our guests have many ideas about how we can utilize informatics to create more efficient means of sharing data and, by extension, improving our overall public health.

Dr. Bryant Thomas Karras is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at the State of Washington Department of Health and a faculty member at the University of Washington's School of Public Health. He is a physician, biomedical engineer, and informatician who uses his multifaceted experience to promote interoperability and help various agencies utilize new technologies in their public health efforts. He's advised health departments on a local, state, and national level, including the Center of Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Jessie Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor at Duke University School of Medicine, and she recently concluded a five-year tenure as the Chief Data Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Her work focuses on enhancing data-driven decision-making to improve public health outcomes and finding AI methods to improve whole person health. She's served on the editorial board for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, on AMIA's Board of Directors, and on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine, all while advocating for women in STEM and precision medicine efforts. We were so thankful to have both of these experts on this episode!

Last but not least, we were joined by a new guest—Lauren Malloy joined us as a co-host for this episode. Lauren is the administrative coordinator for the Artificial Intelligence for Ambulatory Care Innovation Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, which investigates how technology can address healthcare challenges. Her insights into how public health issues manifest in our daily lives were invaluable, and we were honored to have her as a guest star!

We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did filming it!

"Cheat Sheet" to the acronyms discussed in this episode:

-AMIA: American Medical Informatics Association

-APHL: Association for Public Health Laboratories

-CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention

-CDO/CIO/CMIO: Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Medical Informatics Officer

-ECR: electronic case reporting

-EHR: electronic health record

-EIS: Epidemic Intelligence Service

-IIS: Immunization Information System

-IPS: International Patient Summary (Canada)

-HHS: Department of Health and Human Services

-NPI: National Patient Identifier, also National Provider Identifier

-PPRL: Privacy Protecting Record Linkage

-VCI: verifiable clinical information

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It’s no secret that handling medical data is complicated and time-consuming. Of course, the goal is to address the patient buried beneath the in-depth patient notes, multiple EHRs, and drug prescriptions. Perhaps technology can make that a bit easier! In this episode, we have the special privilege of hearing the research of two graduate students who have found the biggest pain points in our primary healthcare system and have brainstormed ways that technology, especially emerging AI, can help address these issues. Every listener will find a way to relate to the stories shared in this episode, and we hope our discussion about the short-term and long-term goals for the application of AI in medicine makes you optimistic about the future of primary healthcare!

Trevor Martinez is a current master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing an MSE in bioengineering. He is primarily interested in the fields of biomedical data science, healthcare, and medical devices. Pavan Patel is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a dual MBA/MA from the Wharton School and the Lauder Institute, and he is also a computer science student at Penn Engineering. Previously, he worked in healthcare at Hazel Health and in private credit and equity at Bain Capital and CI Capital. It was great to hear what these young minds came up with, and they graciously shared some of the visuals they created to explain information silos. If you want to view the visuals along with the podcast, make sure to watch via our YouTube channel!

We also had Dr. Ross Koppel hop on this episode. Dr. Koppel is a professor of sociology and medical informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow at Penn’s Center for Public Health Initiative, and a Senior Fellow at Penn’s Institute for Biomedical Informatics. His hundreds of articles focus on the cybersecurity, usability, and ethics of healthcare information technology and has greatly impacted the field’s understanding of how we can improve human-computer interactions and better integrate HIT into hospital workflow. He was the perfect person to chime in on Trevor and Pavan’s research!

Finally, we had the great pleasure of welcoming a new co-host to our podcast! Dr. Stacy Iannone is the project manager for Dr. Johnson’s lab, which researches computationally-enhanced healthcare. She brings with her an extensive background in clinical research. We were so excited to have her share her insights and experiences on this episode! 

We really enjoyed discussing these students’ insightful research and debating how we see AI entering the conversation. We hope you enjoy listening!

Mentioned in this episode:

-”5 Tactics to Break Down Silos and Support Cross-Functional Collaboration” by Rhonda Stewart

Check out Rhett McDaniel's newest album Rhett McDaniel's Contribution to the Noise Floor

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What happens when you bring together three previous heads of biomedical informatics departments? A lot of reflection, storytelling, and joking around! In this episode, we bring together guests who have previously run informatics departments and are still involved in various ways, whether through research, teaching, or creating content to educate the public. We get the inside scoop into all the administrative responsibilities of these department chairs, their favorite parts of the job, and how they hope to see the field respond to modern technological developments like AI.

We had some fantastic guests on this episode.  Dr. William (Bill) Hersh is a Professor in the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology (DMICE) in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Dr. Hersh served as the inaugural Chair of DMICE from its inception in 2003 through 2022. He also served as Director of OHSU's Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, from its inception in 1996 through 2023. Dr. Hersh also conceptualized and implemented the first offering of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10x10 ("ten by ten") program; his course has been completed by more than 3000 individuals since 2005. In addition, he serves as Editor of the textbook, Health Informatics: Practical Guide, 8th Edition. Since stepping down as department chair, Dr. Hersh has maintained his research and teaching activities, and writes the Informatics Professor blog.

Dr. George Hripcsak is the Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor at Columbia University's Department of Biomedical Informatics. He led Columbia University's informatics department for 15 years. He currently leads the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics coordinating center, which organizes the health records of almost one billion patients. He has authored over 350 scientific papers, serves as the PI for Columbia's recruitment center for the All of Us precision medicine program, and focuses his research on developing the next generation of health record systems.

Finally, our host turned guest for this episode! Dr. Kevin Johnson is the David L. Cohen University Professor of Pediatrics, Biomedical Informatics, and Science Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Before Penn, he was the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University from 2012-2022. He currently researches how to integrate advanced technology and artificial intelligence with health documentation systems. And, of course, he loves sharing informatics with a wider audience whether through his children's books, his documentary projects, or this podcast!

Thanks to our host Harris Bland and our production assistant Ellie Shuert for leading us through this discussion. We loved reminiscing together, and we hope you enjoy getting an inside look into informatics departments!

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How does social media challenge or reinforce our own biases? On this episode, we sat down with the University of Pennsylvania's Desmond Upton Patton to discuss his research on social media and adolescence. We talk about the many roles social media has for young people and how they have taken advantage of social media as a storytelling mechanism and a tool for navigating safety. We discuss how social media can also be reductionist, reinforce negative stereotypes, and even perpetuate misinformation, revealing the flaws in AI and similar technologies. Desmond talks us through all these facets of social media in relation to his work and challenges us to think about what it would look like to recognize social media as increasingly integrated into our reality.

We were so excited to have Dr. Desmond Upton Patton with us for this episode. Desmond is not only a great friend, but an incredible scholar. As a social worker, researcher, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Desmond has published groundbreaking research on the linkage between grief and aggressive behavior on social media platforms, and now his research focuses on the topics such AI, social media, machine learning, empathy, and race with the goal to create unbiased and culturally conscious algorithms. In addition, he serves on the research and safety advisory boards of Twitter, Spotify, and TikTok, and he has been chosen as part of the inaugural cohort of Obama Foundation Leaders for his research. Now, he is the director for the research initiative known as SAFELab at the Annenberg School for Communication, a project we will hear more about in this episode!

We also had with us songwriters Alissa Abeler and Hannah Smith from the Americana duo The Daily Fare. They shared amazing insights not just on their own experiences with social media, but also on songwriting and the storytelling process.

We were so thankful to have this group of people in discussion with us, and we hope you enjoy the episode!

Mentioned in this episode: 

-Sing Me a Story

-AIDS Memorial Quilt

-Follow SAFELab on Twitter

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Is every clinical trial created equal? In this episode, we learn some shocking information about the proportions of populations normally included in clinical trials. We specifically cover recent treatments for Alzheimer’s disease to discuss how we may have failed to consider minority populations in our research and how we can use precision medicine to create more equitable clinical trials. We also discuss how we can redevelop trust in scientific institutions in the wake of the pandemic and how health professionals can adapt their research techniques to include data from historically underrepresented populations.

We had a wonderful cast join us for this episode. We had Stephanie Monroe, Vice President and Senior Advisor of Health Equity and Access for UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, a national advocacy group that aims to diversify the movement to cure Alzheimer’s disease. After working on Capitol Hill and holding the position of Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights for three years, Stephanie’s work has focused on raising awareness about the disparate impact of Alzheimer’s disease on communities of color and women.

We also had Consuelo Wilkins, Senior Vice President and Senior Associate Dean of Health Equity and Inclusive Excellence, and a Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and works with the All of Us Research Program, a national precision medicine project. She is also the Principal Investigator of three NIH-funded centers which aim to decrease health disparities for communities of color and create new approaches to recruiting marginalized communities for clinical trials. 

This conversation was so fun and yielded so many valuable insights regarding how we can create more equitable research for communities of color. We hope you enjoy the episode!

Interested in how misinformation circulates? Listen to our previous podcast episode with guest Evan Thornburg.

Make sure to follow our Instagram, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and Facebook accounts so you can stay up to date on all our new content. Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter @kbjohnsonmd and @htbland21. You can also find us wherever you typically get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

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