When healthcare staffing shortages are discussed, the focus often falls on nurses or home care workers. However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics is creating a critical need for a different kind of professional: digital health informaticians. These experts use AI and computational tools to gather and analyze data, improving outcomes for everyone from emergency room doctors to patients at home.
Recognizing this burgeoning demand, Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) has partnered with Frank Nayemi-Rad (Ph.D CS ’90), a pioneer in health analytics, to launch the Health Tech Talent Institute. This internship program provides opportunities for graduate students to collaborate with industry leaders and develop cutting-edge tools, applications, and other innovative products.
“New large-language models are going to transform health care in a big way. We need to train the next generation in this world of AI,” Nayemi-Rad commented. “We’re going to have doctors that will work with AI to solve problems like never before. But you need knowledge brokers—you need people that understand computer science and AI, and can also be familiar with the complexity of patient care and the complexities of legal systems and policies.”
Maryam Saleh, Executive Director of Illinois Tech’s Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, which hosts the interns, praised the program’s rapid results. “In just a few short weeks, our computer science students learned complex concepts in health informatics and leveraged them to build a product that our health systems partners are interested in piloting,” Saleh said.
The Health Tech Talent Institute is a collaborative effort between Illinois Tech and Nayemi-Rad’s company, Leap of Faith. Leap of Faith is a digital health informatics company providing both licensing and venture capital for new innovations in the field, including grant funding to support the institute’s interns. John Trzesniak, the senior director of information technology at Leap of Faith and an advisor to the program, explained, “We want to create a training program for the health care information worker of tomorrow and expose them to things that, even if you were hired, you may not even get exposed to within the first three to five years. We have a lot of industry partners that we’re working with, and they’re telling us they need people with those skills, not necessarily specific technologies…And the interns are definitely meeting our expectations.”
Illinois Tech President Raj Echambadi highlighted the institute’s strategic importance. “The Health Tech Talent Institute allows Illinois Tech to take the lead in the development of both innovative technologies, as well as the highly specialized workforce required to use them, in the growing field of digital health informatics,” he stated. “What better place for this to happen than at Chicago’s leading tech university?”
The institute prioritizes practical application. Like many programs at the Kaplan Institute, the Health Tech Talent Institute features projects designed for immediate market application. Shreya Padaganur, an M.S. in Computer Science student, reflected on the opportunities. “The [health informatics] field is full of many exciting developments. You address problems that directly affect health care outcomes; it’s an evergreen field. Many students, including me, are choosing to look into this.” Pranjali Deshmukh, also an M.S. in Computer Science student, added: “I wanted to be a doctor in high school, but I ended up doing this. I feel being in this field gives me the best of both worlds,”
Digital health informatics extends beyond analyzing documented health records, incorporating demographic and even ambient voice data collected during patient visits. This real-time data integration has the potential to immediately aid in diagnosis. Currently, four projects exemplify this innovation at the Health Tech Talent Institute, supported by partners like Weill Cornell Medicine at Cornell University, OSF Healthcare, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. The projects include:
- Utilizing AI to recognize patterns and medical keywords documented during emergency room visits to aid physicians by providing quick access to relevant information. This project aids students in understanding healthcare terminology and coding systems and how they are used for clinical decisions.
- Developing a large language model AI trained on healthcare data to assist medical students using a detailed virtual patient that students can interact with and question. This initiative trains interns in how medical students use technology and how to develop adaptive tools.
- Creating AI personas accessible via mobile phone or home computer that track patient activities to give personalized guidance for health questions. This project aids student understanding of healthcare terminology and coding systems and how AI can be used as a companion to patients and a conduit for their doctors.
- Loading electronic health records into a database using the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) standard. This would be used for population health research that focuses on preserving the clinical intent of the codes. The project teaches students how health care terminology and coding systems are used in clinical research.
Program leaders emphasize that all AI-driven decisions and conclusions are reviewed and verified by human physicians.
The internship program also provides extensive instruction beyond data analysis, including training on data transfer nuances, the intricacies of the U.S. healthcare system, and HIPAA regulations. Intern teams present proofs-of-concept to industry partners every two weeks.
Kenneth T. Christensen, Illinois Tech Provost, emphasized the program’s role in fulfilling the university’s mission. “These internships help reinforce Illinois Tech’s philosophy of providing a holistic education for our students, by providing experiential learning on entrepreneurial projects that are currently under development,” he said. “To our knowledge, no other academic institution is addressing the knowledge gap in digital health informatics, which our industry partners say will only grow as health care systems advance into the digital age.”
Saurabha Bhatnagar (CS ’02), a Harvard Medical School instructor in healthcare technology and business operations, believes large companies are actively seeking professionals with interdisciplinary skills. He noted, “Illinois Tech is really uniquely positioned to be a health care technology institute because of the ecosystem it has: its focus on tech, its relationship with [outside] health care institutions, and its global presence in design.”
Nayemi-Rad concluded, “the fact that [Illinois Tech] has thousands of master’s degree graduates and students in computer science is unprecedented. We’re leveraging this pool of knowledge to build an informatics workforce.”
Nayemi-Rad’s career reflects his pioneering spirit. He founded Intelligent Medical Systems in the 1990s, basing it upon his doctoral dissertation. The company was later acquired by Glaxo Wellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline), and it used electronic medical records to normalize clinical data for treatment interventions during the late 1990s HIV pandemic. In 1994, he founded Intelligent Medical Objects to support the commercialization of the HealthMatics electronic medical record product and focus on a medical terminology dictionary, which are used in 90% of that market.
Looking ahead, Illinois Tech and Leap of Faith plan to broaden the program’s scope to include students from various disciplines, including engineering, design, business, and law.
Leap of Faith founder Frank Nayemi-Rad at the Health Tech Talent Institute at Illinois Tech.
