Advances in genomics and biomedical generate huge amounts of data at the molecular level, while wide spread implementation of electronic medical records has dramatically increased digital documentation of healthcare information The objective of this proposal is to design, develop, and implement a cross-disciplinary, short-term training program in methods for utilizing Big Data in the health and biomedical science domain. Our curriculum will be organized as three two-week summer sessions: 1) ?biomedical data science boot camp?; 2) ?Targeted Learning with Case-Based Interdisciplinary Collaborative Learning,? and 3) Integration, Exploration and Analysis of Heterogeneous Biomedical Data Sets for Prediction and Discovery?. Our program will include five knowledge categories: domain knowledge, computation, data representation, data visualization, and data analysis. These five areas will be integrated within an interactive learning environment that builds on principles of case-based learning and follows a flipped classroom paradigm. Program participants will be recruited from among trainees in biomedical informatics, molecular biology, population health sciences, and clinical investigation. Our curriculum will enable collaborating scientists to better comprehend the scientific language utilized in other disciplines. This will enhance communication and facilitate development of a synergistic environment which leads to improved overall quality of research studies. Upon completion of our short-term training, participants will be equipped to bootstrap their own big data research projects, participate in teams tackling big data problems in biomedicine, and pursue additional training in biomedical data sciences. The University of Utah is an ideal place for conducting this training with its superb collaborative academic environment. The University is home to the oldest academic biomedical informatics department in the country, Intermountain Healthcare is recognized as one of the world leaders in integrating informatics into clinical care, and the Salt Lake VA, is the center of VA's major informatics initiatives. Researchers from these three sites are being brought together to train the next generation of big data professionals equipped to propel data-driven analytics in medicine.
Big data revolution has transformed the healthcare industry and poises to be the conduit to bring bench research to bedside. Benefits of big data are innumerable from personalizing medicine to improving overall quality as well as reducing costs of healthcare. However, the numbers of skilled professionals proficient in handling big, heterogeneous, fragmented, incomplete, unstructured biomedical data, is inadequate to balance the rapidly increasing data volumes. We propose a curriculum encompassing foundations in biomedicine and computational technologies, thus catering to the needs of both clinicians and quantitative technologists to coalesce in collaborative and innovative research using big data.
