Dr. Na Hong serves as an Assistant Professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI) in The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth). She joined in May 2022 and has a multidisciplinary background in medical informatics, information science and computer science. Dr. Hong’s research interests are primarily in healthcare data standards and interoperability, terminologies and ontologies, including HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) model, the Observational Healthcare Data Science and Informatics (OHDSI) common data model, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine --Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), etc. Her most recent study focused on research and utilization of clinical data standards to facilitate clinical data representation, retrieval, exchange, sharing and supporting large-scale clinical and translational research.
Dr. Hong also has interests in developing clinical applications to address unmet clinical needs by adopting medical informatics methods and tools, such as AI-based natural language processing tools that collect useful information from text, clinical predictive models that predict specific clinical events or outcomes. Her other research interests include standards-based scalable solutions such as knowledge artifacts that promote portability of applications, data models with generalizability and reusability across institutes, etc. These applications will add value to operational clinical systems.
Dr. Hong notes that “Data standards play fundamental roles for enabling semantic interoperability across healthcare organizations and between EHR systems. Seamless and comprehensive data exchange, portable and scalable data applications are particularly important for healthcare organizations.”