The World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, has named the Regenstrief Institute of Indianapolis as the world's first WHO Collaborating Center for Medical Informatics.
The four-year designation was made for Regenstrief Institute's design, application, and research of medical informatics systems, and enables the World Health Organization to more directly draw upon these capabilities by making the institute part of a larger international collaboration of experts.
The institute's development of Open MRS was cited as a primary reason for the WHO's interest in collaboration. Open MRS is an open medical record system enabling physicians and other healthcare providers in countries with limited resources to provide better informed medical treatment and patient follow-up.
Additional areas of focus by the WHO Collaborating Center for Medical Informatics will be on standardizing health terminology development, community-wide health information exchange, automated patient record matching strategies, and decision support systems. Dr. Paul Biondich, an assistant professior of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, has been named director of the center.
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