TraCS Director John Buse speaks at Carolina's Board of Trustees meeting

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees welcomed five new members at the July 23 meeting and re-emphasized its focus on internal improvement and external communication.

“I think everyone will agree that this is a very hard-working board,” Chancellor Carol L. Folt said, pointing to the group’s commitment to spending time on important issues.

In his opening remarks, new Chair Dwight Stone of Greensboro set the tone for the future with four goals for the board:

• Support Folt and her evolving strategic plan;
• Tell the story of how Carolina improves lives across the state, nation and world;
• Accelerate, measure and communicate the growth and economic impact of the University’s innovation and entrepreneurship initiatives; and
• Help Carolina become more efficient and effective in key operational areas, particularly finance, administration, teaching and research.

Folt recapped recent Carolina honors for the new members, including record years for student applications and philanthropy, the creation of the Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence and the highest possible rating of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute.

She shared her enthusiasm about introducing theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking at a Carolina-sponsored conference in Stockholm next month before introducing the day’s presenters who discussed how their organizations deal with big data.

“We can collect and track reams of information, but it doesn’t really matter unless you have a way of using it,” Folt said.

These two big-data success stories were told by John Buse, co-principal investigator and director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, and Javed Mostafa, director of the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP).

"Faster, cheaper and better" is the goal of NC TraCS, one of 63 Clinical and Translational Science Award institutions in the nation, Buse said. These institutes were created to speed research into application. One of the researchers, a surgeon specializing in bladder cancer, used a grant to study the recovery of these patients and how to prevent their readmission to the hospital.

The surgeon, Angela Smith, urged the board to do what they could to recruit physicians to do research at the beginning of their careers—before they establish medical practices.

NC TraCS was an early source of support for CHIP, Mostafa said during his presentation. The professor of information science at the School of Information and Library Science has a joint appointment to the Biomedical Research Imaging Center. Some of the problems CHIP tackles are health care costs, disparities in access and quality of care.

Mostafa said that the demand for health informatics is up and that interpreting that data has to be interdisciplinary.

To prove that point, he introduced three CHIP faculty members from three different schools (medicine, pharmacy and public health). The students who shared their stories with trustees come from different disciplines, too.

One student, Vincent Carrasco, is a longtime faculty member who gave up surgery to concentrate on research. Now he is starting a second career studying how to diagnose aging brain problems early.

Fei Yu, an information and library science graduate student, was frustrated by how hard it was to get a copy of her own medical records. To find out more about the problem, she searched online for “information and library science” and “healthcare.” The first result of her search, she said, was CHIP.

After each presentation, board members expressed enthusiasm at the accomplishments described.

“This is just fantastic,” Folt said.

Originally post at UNC Spotlights. Read the full article.