The Department of Health Outcomes & Policy Is Now the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics

The Department of Health Outcomes & Policy in the UF College of Medicine has changed its name. Effective immediately, the new name is the Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics (HOBI).

“The name change reflects the growing importance of big data in conducting clinical research, examining health outcomes, addressing health disparities, and improving health care delivery,” said Betsy Shenkman, Ph.D., professor and department chair. Shenkman also serves as director of UF’s Institute for Child Health Policy, co-chair of the UF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (UF CTSI), associate director of population research at the UF Health Cancer Center, and co-director of the OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium.

In 2014, the department hired William Hogan, M.D., to oversee the development of a research faculty team specializing in biomedical informatics, defined as “the analysis of information at the intersection of computer science, biology and health.” The department’s biomedical informatics division now has six faculty members and an mHealth lab. The team provides crucial leadership for the statewide OneFlorida Clinical Research Consortium, a research infrastructure for conducting pragmatic clinical trials and implementation science studies at clinics in all 67 counties in Florida.

The Department of Health Outcomes & Biomedical Informatics offers a certificate program, master’s degree and doctoral program in biomedical informatics. For more information about the department’s degree and certificate programs in biomedical informatics, click the Biomedical Informatics tab on the HOBI website.

In addition to biomedical informatics, the department’s multidisciplinary faculty members perform research in two other key divisions: 1) Health Outcomes, which involves evaluating the quality of efficiency, effectiveness, safety, equity, patient-centeredness and timeliness of health care delivery to improve health outcomes; and 2) Implementation & Decision Sciences, which examines the decision-making processes that inform choices and actions of patients, clinicians and scientists in developing evidence-based health care interventions.