Talk title: "Electronic Health Record-Based Surveillance of Disease: Opportunities and Challenges"

Speaker: Annemarie G. Hirsch, PhD, MPH Associate Professor, Department of Population Health Sciences Geisinger

Traditional approaches to disease surveillance are costly, inefficient, and often limited in their ability to achieve the scalability needed to generate valid estimates of uncommon diseases. Electronic health record (EHR) systems have the potential to play an important role in advancing disease surveillance systems. With the potential advantages of EHR-based surveillance comes a set of new methodological challenges. Annemarie Hirsch, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences at Geisinger. Hirsch, an epidemiologist, has more than 15 years of experience with health system data and studies novel applications of electronic health record data for epidemiologic and health services research. As a researcher in Geisinger’s Center for Community Environment and Health, Hirsch studies the role of the social, built, and natural environment in health. She has been an investigator on the NIH-funded Chronic Rhinosinusitis Integrative Studies Program (CRISP) program since 2013 and is the principal investigator on two CDC-funded diabetes networks, the Diabetes LEAD (Location, Environmental Attributes and Disparities) Network and the Diabetes by Type in Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults (DiCAYA) Network.