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25 CIOs Transforming Healthcare

InformationWeek Healthcare's second annual list of IT executives highlights the exceptional thinkers and doers who are moving patient care forward.

1Comments | Paul Cerrato , Ken Terry , Marianne Kolbasuk McGee and Neil Versel | June 21, 2012 10:00 AM

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Warren Kibbe, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center

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Warren Kibbe, Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center

EHRs aren't built for medical research. "The workflows are so far away from what researchers want to do," said Warren Kibbe, director of cancer informatics for the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and director of bioinformatics for the university's Center for Genetic Medicine.

Kibbe's team does a lot of custom application development because there aren't suitable commercial products to manage the kind of research and analytics projects that the cancer center does. The cancer center's data warehouse is enhancing its research efforts. "We've come a long way in understanding how research and patient care go hand in hand," Kibbe said. Anatomically defined cancer, such as breast cancer, can arise from many different causes, he said. "We don't fully understand this yet, but we're getting there very rapidly."

Analyzing the data in the warehouse should help researchers better understand diseases and enable clinicians to make more informed treatment decisions.

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