Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) CI Fellow, Dr. Suchi Saria, now an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, emphasizes the important role that computational scientists can play towards advancing and improving healthcare delivery in a computational healthcare article in IEEE Intelligent Systems.

The transfer of healthcare records from paper to digital records has been a tremendous catalyst for accelerating change. Today much of an individual’s health data- demographics, personal and family medical history, current and past treatments, vaccination records, laboratory test and results, and so on-are stored in electronic healthcare records (EHRs). This has had a huge impact on data-driven innovations in healthcare delivery.

In the article A $3 Trillion Challenge to Computational Scientists: Transforming Healthcare Delivery, Dr. Saria stresses the importance of future collaborations between computational scientists and healthcare providers.

“First and foremost, it will be valuable for computational scientists to develop deeper relationships and collaborations with healthcare delivery systems, such as hospitals and clinics, and health researchers”.

A deep understanding of statistical and computational sciences is necessary to address the resulting computational challenges due to the transformed healthcare delivery. Computational scientists need to become familiar with fields such as health and biomedical informatics. It is important that computational healthcare scientists gain an appreciation of the science and practice of healthcare in order for the true (and inevitable) collaboration to begin.

A link to the entire article can be found here.