clinical professor in biomedical informatics
Neuroradiologist teaches inaugural class of U of A Phoenix medical campus and post-grad biomedical students at ASU in emerging medical IT field

Shez Partovi, MD, medical director of Medical Informatics, receives support from Barrow Neurological Foundation. “My challenge is to remind people that the IT tools are not the driver. Instead, we need to identify our objectives in terms of patient care, and then find the IT tools to meet those objectives most effectively both from a care delivery perspective and cost of deployment.” -Shez Partovi, MD

When you think of information technology in healthcare, you might conjure up an image of a help desk servicing a doctor’s computer. In reality, though, the application of IT tools to medicine—a developing field known as medical informatics—goes far beyond providing desktop support.

Shez Partovi, MD, medical director of Medical Informatics at St. Joseph’s, has been at the forefront of helping the industry grow from infancy to adolescence over the past 10 years. As a neuroradiologist who also has an extensive background in computer science, he is one of a handful of professionals who speak both languages.

Beginning this fall, Dr. Partovi hopes to help bridge the gap between the two industries as one of the first clinical professors within the newly formed Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) at Arizona State University (ASU). In September, he will begin teaching a group of post-graduate ASU BMI students as well as the inaugural class of the University of Arizona College of Medicine Phoenix campus, which operates in partnership with ASU.

Between the two groups of students, Dr, Partovi is teaching those who will become both the designers and the users of future healthcare information products.

“I have the opportunity to educate both the producers and the consumers of health IT, and that’s a great place to be because I’ll have the privilege of bridging the divide between the two. It’s a very exciting time.”

Integrating medical informatics into ASU, U of A programs

As part of the initial task force behind ASU’s BMI program, Dr. Partovi played an integral role in developing its curriculum. The result, he says, is a balanced mix of both bio and medical topics that’s designed to help students go directly from bench to bedside.

Similarly, the new medical school places a heavy emphasis on biomedical informatics from day one. While most medical schools introduce the topic briefly, U of A has integrated it throughout the curriculum. For example, all of the educational case studies have a medical informatics component.

Dr. Partovi’s lectures will emphasize a patient-centric approach to medical informatics, in which all medical informatics efforts are tied to clinical care and patient outcome—instead of the other way around.

“My challenge is to remind people that the IT tools are not the driver,” he says. “Instead, we need to identify our objectives in terms of patient care and then find the IT tools to meet those objectives most effectively both from a care delivery perspective and cost of deployment.”

Dr. Partovi notes that other industries have used their own IT tool sets for years, yet similar technologies have not been incorporated into healthcare in a broad and cohesive sense. But with the advancement of medical informatics, all of that is changing.

A wall of video screens in a Barrow surgery suite shows observers watching the live surgery from across campus in the TelePresence conference room. Benefactors funded the TelePresence system at Barrow.

Revolutionizing sub-specialty care in rural areas

For example, executives in boardrooms throughout the world have used immersive telepresence technology to communicate for years (“Telepresence” is defined as “the use of communication technology to provide each user with the feeling that users at other sites are physically present.”).

This past April, in a healthcare milestone, a patient at a small medical clinic in northern California and her physicians participated in a three-way telepresence with Barrow neurologist John Kerrigan, MD, in Phoenix and another neurologist in Los Angeles using similar technology.

While Barrow’s telepresence system, TelePresence, has been used to provide real-time contact with its operating rooms since last year, the April event is believed to be the first time the technology has been used for an immersive multi-center patient consultation. In fact, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger attended the event and used it to launch his healthcare reform campaign.

“This was a perfect example of identifying a healthcare need and applying an IT tool to meeting that need,” says Dr. Partovi. “Sure, the technology is great for board rooms, but it could also really revolutionize how sub-specialized care is delivered in rural areas.” He notes that such technology could fill a huge need when it comes to treating patients in national disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. In the meantime, he will continue to gain support for the need to expand technology into healthcare by educating both his colleagues and his students. In fact, he will even deliver some of his lectures this fall via telepresence.

And while he’s excited about the opportunity to reach the new crop of students, he’s even more excited about the medical informatics milestones that are sure to come with them.