Leadership
Makoto Jones, MD
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Dr. Jones is Co-Director of the Medical Informatics Fellowship Program. He is a health services researcher using "big data" to engage in scientific discovery and support healthcare quality improvement. By carefully analyzing the electronic health records (EHR) of tens of millions of Veterans cared for by US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), he addresses pressing priorities in biosurveillance, antimicrobial stewardship, and infection control. He was involved in extracting national microbiology and antimicrobial use data sets and making them available for other scientists and VA quality programs. Dr. Jones is also the director of the Biosurveillance, Antimicrobial Stewardship, and Infection Control Program in the Office of Clinical Systems Development & Evaluation. In this capacity, he has helped build and support, amongst other things, the VA National Surveillance Tool for COVID-19 with related interagency reporting, as well as healthcare-associated infection and antimicrobial use reporting to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Along with these responsibilities, has been actively researching how these data can be used to improve surveillance, infection control, and antimicrobial use and resistance.
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Brian Sauer, PHD, MS
Dr. Sauer is serves as a co-director for the VA Advanced Fellowship in Medical Informatics. His research interests include pharmacoepidemiology, comparative effectiveness research, medical informatics, and causal inference. His PhD dissertation focused on developing computerized indicators of preventable drug-related emergency department and hospital admissions. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Utah Division of Epidemiology and investigator at the Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs (VA) IDEAS COIN Center. His research utilizes large clinical and administrative databases for adverse drug event surveillance and observational comparative effectiveness research. He serves on multiple working groups to develop guidelines for observational comparative effectiveness research. He is knowledgeable in VA health data resources and has been working with VA and other administrative and clinical data for more than 15 years. He has strong research collaborations with Rheumatology, Nephrology, Antibiotic Stewardship, and Orthopaedics.
Tina Huynh, MHA, MPH
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Ms. Huynh received her Master of Public Health and Master of Healthcare Administration from the University of Utah. She is the Program Manager for the Advanced Fellowship in Medical Informatics within the Informatics, Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Sciences Center at the Salt Lake Veteran Affairs (VA) Medical Center. She also helps administer the VA Advanced Fellowship in Medical Informatics Fellowship and has over 7 years of VA experience. She is responsible for general management and operations, including administrative support, program finances, human resources, onboarding, regulatory support, and standard operating procedures. |
Fellows
Samin Panahi, MSc, PhD
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Dr. Panahi is a current Medical Informatics Fellow at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Salt Lake City. Her PhD training is in Medical Sociology focusing on Population Health sciences and her main research interests are in implantation of Natural language Processing (NLP) to better understand cognitive behaviors among the Veteran with epilepsy population. She is also interested in epidemiology using multimodal approaches and mixed method research methodology. She has authored more than 20 peer-reviewed papers across a wide range of research questions within biomedical and health domains. |
Joshua Qualls, PharmD
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Dr. Qualls is a graduate of the University of Florida’s College of Pharmacy and current Medical Informatics Fellow at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Salt Lake City. Dr. Qualls’ research interests include support for pharmacy operations, medical informatics, pharmacogenomics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP)/Machine Learning (ML) implementation. His goals are to implement workflow improvements in pharmacy practice to improve clinical outcomes while reducing provider workload and improving patient/provider experience. To do this, he has piloted rules-based NLP initiatives to improve access to data that is unavailable in the structured electronic health records (HER), to better understand patient- and population-level healthcare outcomes. |