Medical informatics expert presents during brown bag lunch Tuesday, Sept. 8, at Syracuse iSchool

To kick off the new academic year, the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) will host its first Brown Bag Presentation on Tuesday, Sept. 8, from 12:30–1:30 p.m. in Hinds Hall’s Katzer Room (Room347). Lawrence Fagan, co-director of the Biomedical Informatics Training Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine, will present “Future Directions in Computers and Medicine and Opportunities for Information Studies.”

This presentation will cover some of the difficulties of automating the field of medicine, due to a myriad of social and organizational factors as well as significant limitations in underlying computing technology. Fagan will discuss future avenues that he foresees the field of medicine taking, such as integrated networks of communicating electronic health records and patient access to clinical information. He will also address research opportunities for the IT community.

Fagan has more than 30 years of experience in the development and management of computer applications to medical care, a field known as medical informatics. At Stanford University, Fagan helped develop and manage one of the earliest cancer data management systems, the ONCOCIN system, that had the ability to provide decision support based on cancer clinical trials. He also developed one of the first mobile graphical user interfaces for structured data entry of clinical notes. Most recently, Fagan worked on a project for the National Cancer Institute to translate cancer medical records into structured information using natural language processing techniques developed at Columbia University.