I love the power of language and stories to convey meaning, build understanding and challenge firmly held beliefs. This passion led me to become an English major in college. I thought I was bound for a career of writing and teaching. It wasn't until I took a class examining the overlap of literature and medicine that I appreciated how the practices of medicine and biomedical research are disciplines of storytelling and understanding. Patients and families have their own stories to tell and our job as physicians is to listen, understand and even participate in those stories to steer those under our care towards meaningful conclusions. Furthermore, states of disease and wellness are stories in their own right…listening to and understanding biomedical systems and the stories they tell through observation and data is critical to discovering paths to changing those stories for the better.

Today, caring for patients isn’t the only way I put these passions and skills to work. As chief research information officer, I manage and work extensively with information systems including our electronic health record and the clinical data it produces, along with the troves of biomedical data we produce in our efforts to learn the stories of biomedical systems that underpin disease. Much of what I do on a daily basis is using language and communication to bridge two worlds that often speak different languages: information technology and medicine.

It’s my job to understand how healthcare and research professionals can better leverage medical technology to offer improved, safer and more effective healthcare to patients and families and then translate that vision into language our partners in information services can understand and execute upon. The end result is, I hope, information systems that help doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals provide the best care possible for our patients.

This operational work, along with my research, falls under a field known as clinical informatics. I’ve always enjoyed learning how technology works by tinkering with gadgets, building my own computers and exploring programming—which is yet another way of using language to build and explore the world!

The works that most excites me involves the continued evolution of data and analytics at Cincinnati Children’s to discover solutions to operational, clinical and research problems. One example of this would be efforts to leverage clinical data sources to enable more nimble quality improvement through visualization, notification and deeper insight into successes and failures.

I first started working at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center during my residency in 2010. After serving one year as chief resident, I now serve as faculty in the Division of Hospital Medicine, where I care for children who are too sick to go home after visiting the emergency room or clinic but do not have severe enough health problems to be in the intensive care unit (ICU). My research has been published in various journals, including Applied Clinical Informatics, Pediatrics, and Pediatric Quality and Safety.