Service and Practice Overview
BIME has a long history of service and practice activities within the School of Medicine and within the UW Health System. These activities play a key role in achieving our vision to unleash the potential for information to improve biomedicine, health and education. Practice forms a key part of our three-pronged approach of leveraging the bidirectional synergies between a) basic and applied research, b) training the next generation of researchers and practitioners, and c) applying our expertise to the broader operations of UW Medicine including research, clinical care and medical education. Our practice and service activities fall into two categories, biomedical informatics and medical education and evaluation.
In biomedical informatics, our faculty have for over 25 years worked to apply our expertise in biomedical informatics to develop and maintain operational systems to: a) help researchers, b) help clinical practitioners and others running the health system, c) serve a variety of customers needing analytics (health system, practitioners, researchers, students, and others), including those working on quality and safety, and d) support UW precision medicine initiatives. In these activities our faculty are embedded in and partner with: UW Medicine Information Technology Services (ITS, locus of clinical computing), the School of Medicine, UW Medicine, the UW Medicine Office of Research and Graduate Education, our CTSA (ITHS, the Institute of Translational Health Sciences), our Health Sciences Library, our Center for Precision Diagnostics. For those faculty (or future faculty) who are committed to leveraging the synergies between research, education and practice in biomedical informatics, part of our strategic plan is the recruitment of an additional 7 faculty.
BIME Medical Education and Evaluation faculty have been involved with service and practice activities within the medical school since the inception of the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho) program 40 years ago. Faculty have been involved in medical school curriculum design, course design, overall curriculum evaluation, individual course evaluation, the design of final exams, and the implementation of on line testing, as well as long-term longitudinal follow-up of outcomes of graduates of the WWAMI medical school program. Faculty play leadership and other roles in CLIME, the Center for Leadership and Innovation in Medical Education.