Todd R. Johnson, PhD, is a professor of biomedical informatics at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston, formerly UTHealth Houston School of Biomedical Informatics (SBMI). Johnson’s efforts are focused on the application of informatics in clinical settings, including quality and safety dashboards, visual analytics, clinical research informatics and big data for health care. His research uses cognitive science, computer science and human factors engineering to solve biomedical informatics problems. In 1991, Johnson received his PhD in artificial intelligence from The Ohio State University, after which, he continued his research at Ohio State as an associate professor in the Department of Pathology’s Laboratory for Knowledge Based Medical Systems. In 1998, Johnson came to McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics as one of the founding faculty members and served for three years as the associate dean for academic affairs. Johnson left to join the faculty at the University of Kentucky in 2010, where he developed a new academic division of biomedical informatics and led the effort to transform clinical and translational science through the use of new digital methodologies. He rejoined the McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics faculty as a professor on Nov. 1, 2013. Since returning, he has worked on several operational clinical quality improvement projects with Memorial Hermann and UT Physicians as well as research projects on improving Dental Quality. He continues research on how to ease and improve the use of EHR data for secondary use through the UTHealth Center for Clinical and Translational Science.
Dr. Johnson has also played a leading national role in informatics education. He has participated in three AMIA committees to define graduate education in informatics, leading to three AMIA board white papers. This work includes the AMIA Foundational Domains used to certify informatics programs. At present (2023) he is Chair of the AMIA Accreditation Committee--the committee responsible for developing and refining the AMIA Foundational Domains.
Dr. Johnson has also published and spoken extensively on the foundations of informatics as scientific field of inquiry. This work has heavily informed AMIA's foundational competencies for graduate education.
“Informatics is the science of meaningful data, which indicates why informatics is so hard: machines are best at processing data, whereas humans are best at constructing and processing meaning. To better manage and utilize the increasing amount of biomedical data, we need to find ways to program computers to act as if they understand the meaning of that data or to help us derive meaning from data. By doing this, computers can begin to give us information, instead of overloading us with data.”
- Tell us about your research center and/or what research/work you are currently working on?
I work with or as part of 4 different research "centers". I play a small role in UT-HIP, led by Dr. Murphy where I provide input on dashboards for quality assessment and improvement.
I work with HTI (Healthcare Transformation Initiatives), part of the Medical School, on operational and research projects to improve care at UT Physicians. Our current project is to improve HPV vaccination, but we have leveraged this funding (from MD Anderson) to improve ImmTrac2 consent, allowing easier access to the states immunization tracking system, and we have also made the ImmTRac2 information part of the data used by Epic's immunization forecaster. We have also initiated and tested strategies for sending immunization reminders to patients and modified workflow in several primary care UT Physician clinics. The latest advance is that we have gotten permission to include HPV vaccination as part of standing orders. Together, these changes also benefit other immunizations. I am also working with HTI on additional external funding. We had one grant to AHRQ on improving pediatric mental health care that was not funded. We currently have a second grant awaiting review for using primary care clinics to improve cancer survivorship care.
I continue to work on several projects with Muhammad Walji (now at SBMI and the Dental School) on several Dental Quality research projects, including one on antibiotic prescribing that just started on 8/1/2023.
I have also increased my role in the Center for Clinical and Translational Science where I am working on evaluating and improving the quality of our clinical data warehouse and conducting research on how to more easily and effectively make secondary use of clinical care data.
- What type of student or Postdoctoral Fellow are you looking for to work in your center?
Excellent with math, programming, statistics, writing. Motivated and inspired.
- What does the future of your research look like?
On the operational side, there is an endless series of projects that just need funding and internal buy-in to do. Since I work with HTI, I am able to propose projects that make system-wide changes at UT Physicians, including to Epic (within the bounds of what Epic allows). This is an incredible opportunity, though aligning local buy-in with funding opportunities can be challenging.
The Dental Quality research has been very successful at defining new metrics and measuring quality. The latest Antibiotics prescribing grant will following a similar approach with nearly the same team of motivated individuals.
On the CTSA side, I believe that we need to begin to define a research frontier to move the CTSA informatics work forward and then seek additional grants to complete the work. This is somewhat difficult since much of the needed work on the CTSA is foundational informatics research, an area that is traditionally underfunded. Hence we may need to seek funding through a domain-specific agency. The main issue here is that while we have gotten better at understanding the clinical data, the workflow for filling data requests remains essentially unchanged since the start of the CTSA. In addition, we have no standard method for assessing the quality of data pulls.
- What does the future of informatics look like?
My hope is that we will see more focus on foundational informatics issues, but with funding largely in the domain-specific agencies I doubt that that will happen. I hope that the papers that Elmer, Jack Smith, and I have written will help a bit in this direction. I don't think the field is taking the distinction among data, information, and knowledge seriously. The lack of distinction leads to an attitude that if the data is there, the information is also there, which is often not the case.
- What courses do you teach?
BMI 6340: Health Information Visualization and Visual Analytics
This teaches the fundamental theory and best practices for designing health information visualizations and dashboards along with how to implement them in Tableau.
- What major UTHealth Houston departments/institutes do you collaborate with?
Medical School, HTI (Health Transformation Initiatives)
Dental School