Indiana CTSI informatics leader steps up in role

Umberto Tachinardi, MD, is taking on new responsibilities as the sole director of Informatics for Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. Tachinardi has been working within this critical Indiana CTSI program since April, while also managing leadership roles within Indiana University Grand Challenge Precision Health Initiative and the Regenstrief Institute. He says his main role is making sure Indiana CTSI researchers have access to data they need when they need it. His other goals include making sure research systems are integrated to maximize efforts, reduce costs and improve quality of their work. Tachinardi says he feels responsible for developing innovative ways to use data.

“Research was always a data-driven business, but every day, it’s more so,” said Tachinardi. “We’re taking about magnitudes of data and complexities of data that are unparalleled to what we had before. We want to bring novel ideas to solve complex problems that are arising from precision medicine, health systems and big data research.”

In the past, Tachinardi says investigators tended to see data as a compliment to their research. Now it’s coming to the forefront, so his team works to provide data and teach researchers how to use it.

“This informatics business is not specific to informaticians or people like me and my colleagues,” said Tachinardi. “It now becomes important to everyone. Like any other complex equipment or machine, our resources require sophistication on the end of the user. It’s our responsibility to help educate them. Abundance of digital data is changing the game. Data can actually help generate new hypothesis, so human or machine screening data also becomes a way to produce insights for researchers.”

Tachinardi has worked in the informatics field for more than 30 years. Before coming to Indiana, he served as the associate dean for biomedical informatics at the School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Wisconsin-Madison and as the chief research information officer at UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin. He also spent five years as the assistant dean of academic and research informatics and the associate director for clinical research of the Initiative for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Chicago. Before that, he served as the chief information officer for the Secretary of Health of the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil and held leadership positions at the Heart Institute of Sao Paulo University Medical School.