Center for BioMedical Informatics Core (BMIC)

The Center for BioMedical Informatics Core (BMIC) coordinates biomedical informatics for ITMAT (BIIT), the academic home of Penn's CTSA. BIIT promotes strong collaboration among all informatics and health IT groups within Penn Medicine and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), catalyzing the pursuit of enterprise-wide transformational goals.

BMIC has been promoting enterprise-wide transformational strategic planning and institutional developments, while also focusing on the practical applied informatics needs of research investigators. In particular, resource development efforts are being targeted towards essential informatics infrastructure and applied informatics services for the wider research community.

The Director of BMIC, Dr. Marylyn Ritchie, is Director of the Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics and Vice President for Research Informatics, UPHS. She is committed to promoting strong cooperation among informatics faculty and health IT professionals, recognizing that the transformational goals cannot be attained without strong partnerships across the institutions. John Holmes, PhD, Professor of Informatics, is BMIC Associate Director. Drs. Ritchie and Holmes are elected Fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and are actively engaged with the CTSA National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) that is guiding national informatics capacity for the sharing and analysis of clinical data.

The goals for BMIC are to:

1) Develop and support next-generation infrastructure for clinical data storage and management including a new cloud-based data lake (Penn Data Store 2.0), a new translational research data warehouse (PennOmics 2.0), and a new ontology-based database for integrating clinical data from multiple sources (PennTURBO).

2) Develop and support next-generation analytics including Epic cognitive computing, PennAI for user-friendly machine learning, and PennSignals for real-time machine learning analysis of electronic health record data for clinical decision support.

3) Develop and support next-generation infrastructure for support of clinical research including a new clinical trials management system (CTMS) and software to influence patient behavior and clinical decisions.

4) Develop a Penn Medicine Open Data (PMOD) resource for sharing a large de-identified clinical data set (N > 1.5 million patients) that can be used by the CTSA network to advance discovery along with participation in Epic COSMOS and the adoption of data models (e.g. OMOP) and standards (e.g. FHIR) to enable sharing of data.

5) Develop and support next-generation infrastructure for centralizing and integrating external sources of data such as genomics data from the UK BioBank that will augment and add value to the diversity of data collected at Penn Medicine,

6) Participate in the CTSA National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) network by sharing open-source informatics software, making Penn Medicine research resources visible, adopting data models and standards for data sharing, collaborating with CD2H members, and sharing large de-identified clinical data sets.

7) Establish mutually beneficial partnerships with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies that can accelerate the development and deployment of new devices and treatments for improving health.

8) Enable future clinical and translational research through biomedical informatics education and training targeted at graduate students, postdoctoral students, residents, fellows, as well as faculty across the biomedical research spectrum.