Dear Colleagues, 

As the Associate Director of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS) and the program director of the U-BRITE Platform, I am announcing a special call for COVID-19 biomedical data science partnership with DBIDS, which will provide new biomedical informatics resources in our joint fight against COVID-19. 

The original application of informatics in medicine was developing electronic health records and expert systems and enabling the use of data from across multiple systems to assist with research, clinical decision making, and patient care.

“The field of informatics has evolved immensely from its original use,” said Jake Chen, Ph.D., Chief Bioinformatics Officer at the UAB Department of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (DBIDS). “The next step in the evolution of informatics is the collaboration with precision medicine to solve complex clinical and treatment issues facing patients today. This collaboration is about using genomic information and data-driven informatics to build new analytic engines, or the ‘brain,’ of future healthcare,” Chen explained.