- The University of Miami announced it received grants to build AI and machine learning (ML) projects to take on health equities. These are the details.
The University of Miami announced it received grants to build AI and machine learning (ML) projects to take on health equities. This is part of the university’s leadership role in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program.
By recognizing this problem, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity program (AIM-AHEAD) in July with the goal to reduce these health disparities by creating new algorithms and healthcare databases that more accurately reflect the diverse U.S. population. And they had selected the University of Miami’s Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) as one of the institutions to spearhead the program’s infrastructure core, which is one of four pillars of the program. The others are partnerships, research, and data science training.
As a result, the University received a $1.3 million grant to work with historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other minority-serving institutions to create a computing structure for these institutions to share patient data that is void of personal information and that will improve the quality and breadth of health care research.
Joining Tsinoremas to lead the AIM-AHEAD project are Azizi Seixas, associate professor of psychiatry at the Miller School of Medicine and director of IDSC’s population health informatics program and computer science professor Yelena Yesha, who also serves as the Knight Foundation chair of data science and artificial intelligence and IDSC’s chief innovation officer. The 3 are now working with minority-serving institutions across Florida to improve their access to artificial intelligence tools and help them to do more efficient health equity research. Seixas said he and his researchers at the Miller School’s Media and Innovation Lab have reached out to approximately 15 institutions across the state.
On the AIM-AHEAD infrastructure team, Tsinoremas, Seixas, and Yesha are also working with the National Alliance for Disparities in Public Health, Harvard University, and Vanderbilt University. And currently, University leaders are working closely with four institutions in Florida to create pilot programs, and recently received additional funding to support two of these pilot programs.
The team is now part of an additional $500,000 grant to work with Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) Schmidt College of Medicine and the Caridad Center – which is the largest free clinic in Florida for uninsured and underserved children and families of Palm Beach County — to improve their electronic health records so that they can be used more often for research.
Leaders from IDSC are sharing a tool to collect and de-identify patient electronic health records for research that they developed a few years ago for the Miller School. This tool – which is called University Research Informatics Data Environment (URIDE) – is a web-based platform that collects, sorts, and helps researchers visualize this type of patient data from multiple clinical health systems. And this could help healthcare professionals explore demographics, diagnoses, procedures, vital signs, medications, labs, allergies, co-morbidities, and other information for certain patient populations to pinpoint trends or optimal treatment practices.
A second award for $362,000 will help IDSC leaders create another pilot program with Florida Memorial University (FMU) and Miami-Dade College to train 40 existing faculty members and students to use artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques in their clinical practice, research, and curriculum. And in this program, IDSC leaders will also build upon another program they created at the University to attract and foster the careers of underrepresented minorities in science and especially in the burgeoning field of data science.
KEY QUOTES:
“Most of our current data is biased, and often the people collecting this data are not representative of all minorities and cultural differences, We want these biases eliminated, but we also want to create an infrastructure that encourages minority-serving institutions to do this research because these are the people who understand biases in data and algorithms and know how to create more equitable or unbiased approaches.”
“Many of these institutions have fragmented electronic health record systems, which can lead to waste, inefficiencies, and poor communication in health care delivery, which is critical. We’ll focus on trying to bring these fragmented systems together. If we are really serious about tackling the health disparities in Florida that make us unique—like the high prevalence of cardiovascular disease and dementia—we need to build a larger network to really unravel those issues.”
“In terms of technology infrastructure, security, cloud computing, and supercomputing, we have some of the best faculty and staff working at the University of Miami. So, we are able to do more as far as research productivity and output. But if we look just up the road to many of our minority-serving institutions, they don’t have those infrastructures. We are trying to spread our resources around, so these institutions that are often under-resourced can also do cutting-edge research and provide top-of-the-line care, too.”
“We are very excited to collaborate with FAU, Caridad, FMU, and Miami-Dade College to expand the URIDE platform and to become an important piece of the infrastructure that supports the entire AIM-AHEAD consortium. We also want to establish an open-source community around this platform to engage data scientists, data engineers, and developers for continuous improvement of this open-source effort, which we call Hi-RiDE—for Health Informatics Research Integrated Data Environment.”
— Nick Tsinoremas, the University’s vice provost of data science and computing, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as the founding director of IDSC and lead investigator on the AIM-AHEAD grant – who is also the associate director of the Center for Translational Sleep and Circadian Sciences
