Speakers: Randi Foraker, PhD

Randi Foraker, PhD

Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics
Biostatistics & Medical Epidemiology
University of Missouri School of Medicine

 

Randi Foraker, PhD, is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics & Medical Epidemiology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. She earned a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in Health Promotion from the University of Iowa. She holds fellowships in the American Heart Association, American Medical Informatics Association, and the American College of Medical Informatics. Prior to joining MU in 2024, she directed the Center for Population Health Informatics, the Public Health Data and Training Center, and the Center for Administrative Data Research at Washington University in St. Louis (WU). She was recognized by the Academic Women’s Network for their 2020 Presidential Award for exceptional service in science during the COVID-19 pandemic and building the regional data infrastructure necessary for advancing population health. Her research and training grant portfolio has been supported by a combination of governmental and industry grants and contracts. Dr. Foraker specializes in the design of population-based studies and the integration of electronic health record data with socioeconomic indicators as well as the use of synthetic data for research. Her recent research has focused on the application of clinical decision support – embedded in the electronic health record – to complement risk scoring in primary care, cardiology, oncology, and palliative care. She is co-founder of Central Health Intelligence, the 100th faculty startup at WU, which provides artificial intelligence-based clinical decision support for better advanced care planning. In her role at MU, Dr. Foraker is working to advance health and train the next generation of leaders in biomedical informatics, biostatistics, and medical epidemiology to improve health and healthcare at local, national, and international levels.

 

Improving Healthcare Through AI-based Clinical Decision Support

Dr. Foraker will share the story of a health system-wide intervention designed to increase goals of care discussions (GOCDs) for patients at high risk of mortality. The program combined AI-based mortality risk prediction, clinician training in advanced care planning, and direct clinician alerts to prompt GOCDs, and was implemented across 8 hospitals between 2020 and 2024. the intervention achieved high clinician engagement and led to major system-level improvements in quality measures and patient satisfaction.