4th Illinois Health Data Analytics Summit: Vaccination & Post-COVID Health Challenges

Bala N. Hota, M.D. | Vice President & Chief Analytics Officer, Rush University Medical Center

Dr. Hota is a Vice President, Chief Analytics Officer, Associate Chief Medical Officer, and Associate Chief Information Officer at Rush University Medical Center. He is also a board certified Infectious Diseases physician and Professor of Medicine. His focus at RUMC has been the development of tools and systems to measure and improve quality of care, and advance data science.

Dr. Hota has, through effective use of information technology, developed software products to automate condition reporting and surveillance for public health departments; improved workflows using the EMR to recapture $50M in improved revenue cycle; developed a big data and statistical consulting group to enable advanced analytics and data science on demand; and has successfully built and commercialized software for the measurement of comorbidities for accurate risk adjustment. He has also modeled academic productivity in Informatics, publishing 57 articles on various informatics related topics. Most recently he has focused on quality measurement, identifying and publishing on issues in the US News Hospital Ranking Methodology and the CMS Star Rating System; in both instances the rating systems were improved following the proposals. He is always interested in finding novel methods to leverage information technology to improve the care patients receive.

Sarah Patrick, Ph.D. | Chief, Division of Emerging Health Issues & Lead, COVID-19 Data Intelligence Team, Illinois Department of Public Health

Dr. Patrick is the Chief of the Division of Emerging Health Issues and lead of the COVID-19 Data Intelligence Team at the Illinois Department of Public Health. She is interested in communicating public health and scientific writing, opioid epidemic addiction and prevention, disease outbreak prevention, and public health leadership. She holds a BS in exercise physiology from the University of Illinois and a MPH and Ph.D. in epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. Patrick is also an assistant professor in public health at Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s School of Public Health and Recreation Professions.

Bruce Tromberg, Ph.D. | Director, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health

Dr. Tromberg is the Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where he oversees an approximately $400 million per year portfolio of research programs focused on developing, translating, and commercializing engineering, physical science, and computational technologies in biology and medicine.  In addition, he leads NIBIB’s $500 million Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx Tech) innovation initiative to increase SARS-COV-2 testing capacity and performance.

Prior to joining NIH in January 2019, he was a professor of biomedical engineering and surgery at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Dr. Tromberg specializes in the development of optics and photonics technologies for biomedical imaging and therapy. He has co-authored more than 450 publications and holds 23 patents in new technology development as well as bench-to-bedside clinical translation, validation, and commercialization of devices. 

Dr. Tromberg received his undergraduate training in chemistry from Vanderbilt University (1979) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from the University of Tennessee (1988) where he was a U.S. Department of Energy/Oak Ridge Associated Universities Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.