The Center for Health Informatics (CHI) is a revolutionary concept in healthcare: the first very large scale, integrated solution for healthcare research and knowledge delivery.

CHI will provide a secure, seamless, global computing platform for creating and exchanging health information between the public, private and academic sectors.The collaboration focuses on providing medical practitioners with world-class knowledge in realtime – when insights have the greatest ability to improve outcomes and patient care.

The issue: A fundamental disconnect

As medical information multiplies at exponential rates, even the best physicians and researchers are literally unable to keep up. Vast data quantities meanwhile are being accumulated by separate institutions, in disparate locations, on different computing systems and in isolated data sources. Information privacy and security concerns heighten barriers to sharing – or even awareness of – relevant healthcare insights.

Breakthrough discoveries, diagnoses and treatments actually may be buried in existing data, yet no technology currently exists to collect that data, extract knowledge and disseminate results. This fundamental disconnect significantly impacts quality, cost and equality of medical care around the globe. CHI’s founders believe that the imperative to understand healthcare data is now as great as that to understand human biology itself.

About CHI

The Center for Health Informatics (CHI) is a nonprofit research partnership of major research universities, labs, hospitals and other medical providers. By exploring the intersection of information science, computer science and healthcare, CHI seeks to bridge between vast quantities of disparate, isolated medical data and individual physicians’ ability to provide optimal patient care.

The collaboration is headquartered at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI), a major computing research and development institute affiliated with the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering (VSoE). Partners include the University of Chicago, and St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., among other entities. CHI is directed by Carl Kesselman, Ph.D., Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and of Computer Science at VSoE, and by Stephan Erberich, Ph.D., Research Professor of Biomedical Engineering at VSoE. Kesselman and Erberich also co-direct the Medical Information Systems division at Marina del Rey, Calif.-based ISI.