The Rochester Center for Health Informatics (RCHI)

The Rochester Center for Health Informatics (RCHI) is a “healthcare learning center,” using healthcare data and cutting-edge data science to iteratively improve the health of our community—with the goal of making Rochester the healthiest community in the nation. Our focus is using health informatics, graph theory, and “big data” analytics to distill of massive amounts of healthcare data into actionable findings. We strive to be in the space of discovery, using data to find the questions we are not yet asking about things we do not yet know. We are particularly interested in how the healthcare system and the community are interconnected and interdependent, and how these connections contribute to population health. Our work concentrates on modeling the effects of a changing healthcare system on communities and populations, developing and testing health improvement methods, measuring their impact, and repeating this process to optimize population health and the delivery of healthcare.

The RCHI was founded in the fall of 2014 and is rapidly expanding. We are closely aligned with the University of Rochester Clinical & Translational Science Institute and the Institute for Data Science. We are enthusiastic practitioners of team science, bringing together teams of talented experts to nimbly and rapidly work on specific research projects with depth and focus.  Within the University of Rochester, our teams include physicians, statisticians, data scientists, epidemiologists, public health experts, and other domain experts. We actively seek partners from the community, industry, and other academic research centers. Through our close collaborations, we are developing and using novel analytic methods in systems informatics, graph theory, network analysis, and visualization of high dimensional data.