The Boston Children's Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP), founded in 1994, is a multidisciplinary applied research and education program. Our faculty advance the science of biomedical informatics for molecular characterization of the patient, gene discovery, medical decision making, diagnosis, therapeutic selection, care redesign, public health management, population health, and re-imagined clinical trials. Biomedical informatics has become a major theme and methodology for biomedical science, health care delivery, and population health, involving high-dimensional modeling and understanding of patients from the molecular to the population levels. The field is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional biomedical disciplines, the science and technology of computing, data science, biostatistics, epidemiology, decision theory, omics, implementation science, and health care policy and management. CHIP faculty are trained in medicine, data science, computer science, mathematics and epidemiology. Though CHIP has a robust pediatric research agenda, our contributions span across all ages. CHIP is a collaborating program with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School.
The Program’s innovations have transformed the landscape of big data in health care, the use of AI in clinical decision making, and the IT strategies of commercial enterprises. CHIP discoveries and inventions have been widely adopted by technology companies such as: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Leading projects include the SMART on FHIR “app store for health”, the cTAKES pipeline for computerized “reading” of clinical text, the HealthMap global surveillance system, the VaccineFinder tool to help the public locate COVID-19 vaccines, and the federated data sharing Genomic Information Commons.
CHIP software is reading millions of doctors’ notes across sites of care and surfacing key insights about adverse medication effects. CHIP research has strongly influenced public policy from vaccine recommendations to health IT provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act to paradigm shifts in data provisioning by CMS. CHIP’s biosurveillance computational platforms have found the earliest signals of Ebola outbreaks. On the basis of these advances, Health 2.0 voted Boston Children's Hospital the 10 Year Global Retrospective Top Influencer among all health care organizations.
