Parsa Mirhaji
| vCard Parsa Mirhaji | |
|---|---|
| Affiliation: | KnowMED Incorporated |
| Homepage: | KnowMED.Com |
PC member of: RuleML2006
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Dr. Parsa Mirhaji (MD, PhD) has over 20 years of experience combining biomedical informatics research and health information technology skills, with leadership and management qualities for academic research, teaching, and directing large-scale multi-institutional information technology projects with multi-disciplinary teams of researchers, engineers, and users to meet performance, quality, and efficiency milestones.
Dr. Mirhaji is a world renown expert in the Semantic Web technologies in healthcare and life sciences, an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas-School of Biomedical Informatics at Houston (SBMI), the interim CEO of the KnowMED Inc., and the director of the Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research, where he has developed regional biosurveillance and bioterrorism preparedness networks, semantic information integration technologies, mobile applications for disaster preparedness, and information and knowledge management platforms for multi-institutional and translational clinical research, clinical decision support, and pharmacovigilance.
Dr. Mirhaji’s has established “the Public Health Informatics program” for the first time at the SBMI, and has developed and offered the basic and advanced courses on “knowledge and information representation in health informatics”, and “the cognitive engineering and psychology of design“ course that are all offered through SBMI certificate, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For his dedication to the students and top performance in the class, Dr. Mirhaji was nominated by the SBMI students to receive the John P. McGovern Excellence in Teaching Award at 2010.
Dr. Mirhaji’s research involves characterizing a Unified Exchange Languages (UEL) for distributed and interoperable clinical information systems, semantic representation of biomedical taxonomies and vocabulary services, knowledge management in distributed health information systems, cognitive engineering, psychology of design and human-computer interaction, decision support for clinical applications through advanced knowledge representation, information models for continuity of care and longitudinal health records, clinical text understanding and natural language processing, knowledge-based analytics and model driven business intelligence (fraud detection, competitive intelligence, predictive modeling), secondary use of health information for quality metrics, patient classification and risk analysis, and translation clinical research.
Combined with his leadership and project management skills, his years of research has yielded novel informatics solutions that have been field tested, and operationally validated on real world settings such as real-time biosurveillance and bioterrorism preparedness (greater Houston metropolitan area since 2004, in collaboration with the Memorial Hermann Healthcare System (MHHS)), regional influenza outbreak detection and reporting (greater Houston metropolitan area since 2005, in collaboration with MHHS and the CDC), County-wide school absenteeism reporting (in collaboration with the Harris County, 4th largest county in the nation: 2009-2010), Shelter biosurveillance and response planning (During Hurricane Katrina, in collaboration with Houston Department of Health and Human Services: 2005), Multi-center clinical translational research (by the UTHSC-Center for Translational Injury Research, and across 10 largest trauma centers in the country: 2009-present), Translational Oral Health Research (through a consortium of dental schools including the UT-Houston, Harvard, US-CF and Tufts: 2010-present) , and the CTSA-National Bio-Bank Consortium (a health information exchange consortium comprising of UT-Houston, UC-Davis, UT-Southwestern Medical Center, UT-San Antonio, UC-SF and Duke University: 2008-present), and the elementary and kindergarten learning assessment (in collaboration with the Texas Children Learning Institute: 2011).
On January 2011, Dr. Mirhaji was invited by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of National Coordinator (ONC) to discuss the Universal Exchange Language envisioned by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on the next generation interoperability of health information systems, and to report on the role of the Semantic Web technologies in realizing that vision. Dr. Mirhaji is currently a technology consultant to the White House senior policy advisors on the role of modern health information technology for establishing patient centered, ultra large scale, and interoperable health information exchange platforms that can improve health, reduce costs, and create new market opportunities and sustainable economical incentives for sharing health information.
Dr. Mirhaji and his fellow researcher were awarded “The Best Practice in Public Health Award-2002” by the Department of Health and Human Services for establishing the Defense of Houston web-portal for community awareness and public readiness in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.
Dr. Mirhaji has been an acting committee member on the Texas Hospital Preparedness Program at the Texas State Department of Health Services and the Texas Institute for Health Policy Research, and a member of the Health Information Technology Advisory Commission for the Texas State Department of Health Services, where he contributed to conceptualization and development of state wide public health preparedness plans and policies related to adoption and utilization of health information technologies to improve delivery of health services in the state of Texas. He has been an active member of W3C workshops for application of Semantic Technologies in Healthcare and Life Sciences, and organizer and committee member of several national and international conferences on subjects related to semantic technologies, healthcare and life sciences.
