Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP)

SMART is run out of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP). CHIP, founded in 1994, is a multidisciplinary applied research and education program. Our faculty advance the science of biomedical informatics for molecular characterization of the patient, gene discovery, medical decision making, diagnosis, therapeutic selection, care redesign, public health management, population health, and re-imagined clinical trials. Biomedical informatics has become a major theme and methodology for biomedical science, health care delivery, and population health, involving high-dimensional modeling and understanding of patients from the molecular to the population levels. The field is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional biomedical disciplines, the science and technology of computing, data science, biostatistics, epidemiology, decision theory, omics, implementation science, and health care policy and management. CHIP faculty are trained in medicine, data science, computer science, mathematics and epidemiology. Though CHIP has a robust pediatric research agenda, our interests span across all ages. For the work of CHIP, Health 2.0 voted Boston Children’s Hospital the 10 Year Global Retrospective Top Influencer among all health care organizations. CHIP has just celebrated its 25th Anniversary.

Boston Children’s Hospital is a 395-bed comprehensive center for pediatric health care, which is one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States. Despite the name, the research impacts from BCH are not just pediatric and cover the age spectrum from discovery of angiogenesis and its role in cancer, to invention of cutting-edge public health surveillance systems used world-wide. Children’s is home to the world’s largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical institution. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 on-staff members of the Institute of Medicine and 9 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, comprise our research community. Current initiatives have attracted a record $225 million in annual funding, including more federal funding than any other pediatric facility. BCH has just celebrated its 150th Anniversary.