Systems

CalIVRS - The California Integrated Vital Records System (2004 - present]

In 2003, I was approached by the California Department of Public Health about working with them to develop a large-scale, secure, web-based, vital records registration system.  We first designed and deployed a death registration system in 2005 (CA-EDRS) and it has become one of the largest and most feature-rich death registration systems in the US.  CA-EDRS was first deployed Jan 1, 2005 after a 13 month development.  The system today handles all death certifications in California (~240,000/yr) . In 2018 California needed to modernize a birth registration system, previously developed by Dr. Ron Williams of UC Santa Barbara and used in California for nearly three decades. We worked with Dr. Williams team and in late 2018 deployed CA-EBRS. Today, CA-EBRS handles all birth registrations in California (~500,000) . 

CalIVRS System home page

California Vital Records Business Intelligence System - VRBIS (2017 - present)

The system enabled California to provide access to real time vital statistics data to county public health officers for the first time in its history. VRBIS is a large-scale data repository and data provisioning system for California vital records data. It is a key component of providing California vital records data sets for public health officers across its 58 counties as well as over 50 federal and state agencies.  VRBIS is a subsystem in the CalIVRS system.

Integrating Medical Information into EDRS - IMAGINE (2016-2018)

The IMAGINE system is the first system in the world to integrate an electronic vital records death registration system with a commercially available EHR (Epic Corp). IMAGINE uses the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Remote Form for Data capture (RFD) standard. The IMAGINE module and CA-EDRS were certified by IHE as complying with the standard in Jan 2016.  In May 2017, California’s EDRS became the first death registration vital record system in the US to be integrated with a health system’s EHR. It is currently operational at UC Davis Health System. 

IMAGINE Project Brief (pdf)

IMAGINE IHE "Projectathon" Slide Deck (2016)

IHE QRPH Vital Records Death Registration draft standard for trial use (2015)

INteroperability to Support Practice Improvement, Disease REgistries and Care Coordination - INSPIRE (2014-2015)

A prototypical system designed and implemented to improve the capture of clinical data for high impact conditions (ie, cancer). The resulting reference system demonstrated the following principles: (1) improving coordination of care, (2) support for structured data entry of key data elements, and (3) interoperability.  The prototype system was implemented on the Salesforce Force.com platform.

INSPIRE concept slide deck (2013)

INSPIRE presentation to ASCO informatics working group (2015)

The Athena Health Questionnaire System (HQS) and Platform (2012) 

A web platform designed for collection of electronic patient reported information (ePRI).  The system was developed using the Salesforce Platform as a Service (Force.com), and has been integrated with electronic health record systems using an Interface Engine (MIRTH Corp). The system includes breast risk cancer prediction models implemented as web-service enabled decision support components, accessible to the HQS system, and rendering a score/report sent to EHRs using HL-7 messages through an Interface Engine.

Athena Informatics Platform Overview (2015) 

More about the Athena Breast Health Network Project.  

Athena Breast Health Network home page


UC Davis Clinical Resources Center (1997 - present)

I originally developed the CRC with Benny Poon, David Oaks, and Vicki Bencken of the Center for Health Technology (CHT).  We conceived of a configurable web based system that could provide basic dynamic 'pages' with links to internal (private) and external(public) web content.  At the time, we were hosting over 80 websites for various groups within the UC Davis Health System and wanted to provide an easy alternative to traditional hosting. Today, these systems are known as "portal systems".  We took the concept further and used the system to implement a knowledge portal to provide clinically relevant reference information at the point of care using a web interface. Our first such resource was Gold's drug database, a searchable ICD database, and a searchable formulary.  Today, it continues to be used and has about 5,000 users throughout UCDHS. It provides access to a large array of resources including online web-enabled textbooks, internally authored clinical guidelines, and residency curricula for many departments.  The CRC was adopted as an internal system with continued development under Dr. Peter Yellowlees, and eventually was transitioned to the UCD Health System IS department, which hosts/manages the system and continues evolving its functionality.

CRC "concept" deck (2000)

CRC Presentation: Distributing Medical Knowledge Content to the Healthcare Enterprise  (2001)

CRC Screen shot (2020)

Clinical Resource Center Portal home page

TRANSCEND - TRANslational informatics System to coordinate Emerging biomarkers, Novel agents, and clinical Data (2009-2012)

A collaboration with Dr. Laura Esserman (UCSF Breast Cancer Center of Excellence) and the NCI Center for Bioinformatics (CBIIT) to build an integrated informatics architecture that supports adaptive clinical trials. The system is used to support the ongoing I-SPY 2 Breast Cancer Trial.  TRANSCEND uses several caBIG components as well as an open source web-based secure clinical information system for data capture at the point of care. 

TRANSCEND presentation slide deck (2009)

MOJO - Medically Oriented Java-based Ontologically Aware System (2010)

A project of one of my graduate students, Bill Reidl, the system employs a number of natural language processing techniques to undertake concept identification.  Given concept-based auto-coding of healthcare information is highly dependent on correctly spelled content, MOJO includes a spell checking module. Both the concept identification and spell checking functionality have been implemented as REST services. 

AMIA Symposium Proceedings paper. 2010: 677-681.

jTerm (1999 - 2001)

An open-source java-based terminology server I originally developed as a light-weight transactional query frontend for concept-oriented terminologies. At first, it implemented a query-language interface (TQL), but I later modified to use URL based commands, which allowed me to leverage http/https and the web server as transactional infrastructure.

AMIA Symposium Proceedings abstract. 2003: 881.

UC Davis "MyInfoVault" (2002 - present)

MyInfoVault is a system originally developed as the “Mission Based Reporting (MBR) System” to provide a system to compute academic productivity along the missions of teaching, research, and service.  The system was subsequently enhanced such that it provides an electronic faculty dossier management, and has since been adopted by UC Davis as an electronic merit/promotion management system. The system today is managed and continually improved by the UC Davis campus IT department.

MyInfoVault concept slide deck (2011)

UC Davis MyInfoVault

System Screenshot (2020)


QD-POP (Quick and Dirty POP Mail) (1996 - 2000)

Designed and developed in 1996, it was one of the first systems to web-enable email. Jose Galvez, David Hill, and myself developed the system using Perl, a commonly used language in  common gateway interface (CGI) programming at the time. CGI was a way to web-enable access to back-end non-web systems. 

ODYSSEY (1995 - 1997)

A project involving the development of a specialized web browser for use in healthcare environments. This was early in the evolution of the Web and mostly an experiment in using Web-based technology in a healthcare setting. Designed by Benny Poon and myself, Odyssey was a configurable web browser built in Delphi (Object Pascal on Windows) implementing a number of features not present in Mosaic, the most used browser at the time.  We implemented 'quick links' on the browser's URL bar to enable quick access to Medline, QD-POP (see above) and selected links to high-value healthcare web content (the Virtual Hospital, etc..).  Most browsers today support this feature as a bookmark-bar. The browser's default behavior could be configured using a local administrative password. For example, one could disable the print and openURL functions.  We proposed that browsers should have this kind of configurability "on the fly" after an authentication step with a remote web server, which would provide the configuration based on the user and location using information embedded in the HTTP header using META tags.