Shama Karanth, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in the UF Department of Surgery, has been selected for a workforce training program on health care data run by the National Institutes of Health.
Karanth, a member of the UF Health Cancer Institute’s Cancer Control and Population Sciences research program, will begin the AIM-AHEAD FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) Collaborative Training Program on Feb. 16.
FHIR is a standard for health care systems to share data in a consistent format and language, making it easier to reuse health information for care and research. The NIH program is designed to build a national cohort of “FHIR champions” who can accelerate adoption of interoperability standards across health care and research settings.
“Through this training program, my goal is to build core knowledge that will allow me to work more effectively with interoperable clinical data and collaborate more productively with informatics and data science partners,” Karanth said.
This program will allow Karanth to develop practical skills in health data interoperability in a multidisciplinary learning community, accelerating her research on cancer outcomes and survivorship. She hopes to gain a foundational understanding of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources concepts, common data elements and how standardized health data can be accessed and used for research.
“Learning how FHIR supports data standardization and sharing will strengthen studies of cancer outcomes, survivorship and disparities, and it will support more efficient multi-site research in the future,” Karanth said.
The program concludes with the AIM-AHEAD Annual Meeting in July in Dallas, Texas.
This research was, in part, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Agreement No. 1OT2OD032581. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the NIH.
