s 
    University of California San Francisco

Ida Sim, MD, PhD

Position & Affiliation:

Education:

Awards:

Research Interests:

  • Informatics for clinical research

  • Clinical trial registration and publication into structured knowledge bases (trial banks)

  • Decision support systems for evidence-based practice

  • Economics of health information technology

My broad research objective is to define and build foundational informatics systems for clinical trial research and reporting that will enable a new generation of clinical decision support systems for evidence-based practice. My work has four major inter-related parts:

  1. Understanding the information needs of rigorous evidence-based reasoning. Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) are one of the least biased and most valuable sources of evidence for improving clinical care. To better understand how RCT evidence is appraised and combined, I have conducted meta-analyses of RCTs using hierarchical Bayes and meta-regression methods. I also defined the first formal definition of the gap between evidence and practice, and proposed a new measure (the Number Not Prevented, NNP) to quantify it (SMDM Best Paper by a Young Investigator, 2004). This work contributes to detailing the nature of computer-based decision support that is required to promote best practices in evidence-based medicine. 

  2. Developing new informatics for clinical research. Informatics is the use of computation to understand and manage complexity. The complexity of clinical research is rapidly exploding with the advent of translational methods and opportunities. My lab focuses on clinical trial informatics in the broader context of clinical and translational research. My Trial Bank Project continues to define the fundamental informatics science of trial banks: computable knowledge bases of clinical trials that will enable more powerful decision support for evidence-based practice and trial quality assessment. Trial banks contain all the trial information needed for systematic reviewing and evidence-based reasoning (i.e., the trial’s design, execution, and summary results). We are integrating trial banks with the Electronic Primary Care Research Network, a national computing infrastructure for distributed primary care research. We are also driving the development of fundamental technologies for biomedical knowledge management through our participation as a Driving Biological Project of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology.

  3. Promoting universal trial registration and trial reporting into computable "trial banks." Several recent cases of companies withholding negative clinical trial results have galvanized the movement towards universal trial registration and results reporting. As the founding Project Coordinator of the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform project from 2005-6, I advance the science, policy, and informatics of a global system for clinical trial registration and reporting.

    4. Through the Trial Bank Project, we are working with research funders, major medical journals, and trial registers to explore fundamental research issues in capturing and reporting trials through trial-bank reporting, in which randomized trials are published as both a journal article and as an entry into a trial bank. Complementing our research in the Trial Bank Project is Global Trial Bank, an AMIA project that is developing an operational implementation of the trial bank  concept.

  4. Understanding the socio-technical and economic barriers to use of health information technologies. Despite their much ballyhooed promise, electronic medical records (EHRs) and CDSSs are not widely used. I have been investigating with Robert Miller the organizational and economic factors contributing to this limited uptake. In addition, we have defined a comprehensive taxonomy of CDSS design and usage for understanding heterogeneity among CDSSs.

These projects contribute to a greater understanding of both the technical and non-technical challenges of providing computer-based decision support for clinical research and for closing proof to practice gaps.

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Last updated on 25-Jan-07. Copyright 2003-2007 UC Regents.