By Taxiarchis Botsis, Jan 28, 2014, Tuesday, 10 am, ITE 459, Department of Information Systems, UMBC

This presentation will describe the contribution of Informatics to the promotion of population health and the corresponding use of various methods for getting the most from BIG DATA. The presentation will begin with a short discussion on the disease surveillance for high risk populations using diabetics as a prototype and the nuances of handling large Electronic Health Record data. Then, the talk will focus on the post marketing safety surveillance and, particularly, the extraction of key features from spontaneous reports, the use of case classification methods, the retrieval and quantification of specific information (of interest) and the pattern recognition and signal identification from BIG DATA; certain methodologies with real examples will be presented. A new approach for the literature-based development of case definitions will be also discussed.

Brief Speaker Biography: Taxiarchis Botsis works as a Medical Informatician at the Office of Biostatistics and Epidemiology (OBE), Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) at the FDA. He is also an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway. His background lies in the field of Medical Informatics. After receiving his MSc and PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Athens in Greece he worked on the data management of International Randomized Clinical Trials. He then received a fellowship from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) to work as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Tromsø in Norway; at that time his main area of interest was the disease surveillance for high risk populations. He then spent one year at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University (New York, NY) where he worked on a number of Electronic Health Record data mining projects. In 2010, he received an ORISE fellowship to work on post-marketing safety surveillance at OBE at the FDA (Rockville, MD) and, last year, he was promoted to a full-time employee. During this period he has been working on various projects and developing new approaches for improving the efficiency, effectiveness and rigorousness of safety surveillance.