Fred W. Fan, Ph.D.

Location

Contact

SUMMARY

The primary research area of Jung Wei (Jungwei) Fan, Ph.D., is translational informatics. He applies informatics methods to facilitate knowledge management and delivery in the health care setting. He leverages both structured and unstructured clinical data to promote well-informed decision-making.

Dr. Fan's work contributes to the automation of evidence-based medicine by integrating practice recommendations into clinical systems. The other major agenda in his research is to generate reusable knowledge from real-world clinical practice and outcome information buried in various data sources. These components ultimately converge to serve the goal of improving quality in patient care.

Focus areas

• Knowledge management and delivery for clinical practice. This implementation research aims to integrate best-practice recommendations into routine health care systems and workflows. It also applies descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics to understand and meet the operational needs in practice.
• Derive knowledge from clinical practice variation. This agenda features reverse translation from observed practice to the augmentation of knowledge conventionally acquired through clinical research. Informatics methods are used to identify the patterns and underlying factors of clinical practice variants, especially in the context of comparative effectiveness and risk.
• Fundamental and applied biomedical language processing. These studies use computational linguistics to understand the structure and meaning of biomedical sublanguage; extract and organize knowledge from diverse narratives including clinical notes, scientific literature and consumer-generated communications; and combine narrative information with other data types for a full picture that characterizes each patient's status and needs.

Significance to patient care

Translational informatics delivers data-driven tools to empower clinicians and patients. Dr. Fan's work promotes the efficient use of existing medical knowledge at the point of care. His research also establishes a feedback loop for eliciting insights from real-world clinical practice to refine existing knowledge. Dr. Fan's research methods are meant to be applicable across different conditions and to enable iterative quality improvement in patient care.