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Annual Conferences on Health IT & Analytics 2021-2023

Providing a forum to bring together a broad range of stakeholders among academia, government, and industry on the trends and knowledge gaps in HIT+A facilitates collaboration and promotes the opportunity for these stakeholders to understand critical issues in practice, and the most pressing policy agenda items that are in need of rigorous, scientific research.

Project Details -
Ongoing

The healthcare landscape is changing dramatically, largely driven by digitization of medical information, innovations in information technology (IT), new applications of artificial intelligence (AI), and policy developments. New opportunities and challenges emerge daily regarding the design, implementation, management, use, and evaluation of health IT and analytics (HITA). Since 2009, the Conference on Health IT and Analytics (CHITA), initially called the Workshop on Health IT & Economics, has been a key health IT research summit. The conference develops a health information technology and analytics (HIT+A) research agenda supporting national efforts to create learning health systems that produce evidence to make healthcare safer, of higher quality, more accessible, equitable, and affordable.

The 2021-2023 CHITA conferences will examine the determinants of successful and equitable implementation of digital healthcare tools and disseminate the findings. CHITA’s primary aim in this grant period will be to improve the use of evidence-based practices regarding effective and non-biased implementation of digital healthcare and AI tools. The overarching goal is to deepen understanding of strategy, policy, and systems fostering HITA effective use, and to stimulate new ideas with both policy and business implications. Special emphasis will be placed diversity and equity considerations in HITA application design and implementation.

The specific aims of the research are as follows:

  • Foster HITA implementation lessons for dissemination.
  • Advance HITA and AI implementation research.
  • Empower the next generation of AI researchers with diverse backgrounds.
  • Foster a cross-disciplinary research community.

The 2021-2023 conference sessions will be linked to AHRQ Digital Healthcare Research Goals, including usability of AI and digital tools, clinical decision support and safety, health systems-level improvements, and consumer-focused digital healthcare. Grantees of AHRQ’s digital healthcare research portfolio will be encouraged to present their work. In addition, given lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, there will be a focus on AI and analytics for public health emergency response. As in the past, the conference will be preceded by a doctoral consortium with an aim toward training the next generation of health IT and AI researchers, with a special focus on minorities and those from disadvantaged groups. Following the meeting, findings will be synthesized and disseminated, including implementation research and lessons learned of digital healthcare tools with an emphasis on the appropriate, ethical, and fair use of AI toward healthcare decision making, quality, whole-person care, and value-based transformation efforts.