A public health expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been named the first Anthem Fellow in health informatics at the Indiana University School of Informatics
Timothy Jay Carney will begin his doctoral studies and research activities during the fall 2006 semester at the School's IU-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.
It's made possible by a $35,000 grant from the Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Foundation.
A second fellowship will be awarded in 2007.
Established in 2000, the Anthem Foundation awards grants to programs and initiatives that help people in Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield communities manage and improve their health and enrich the greater community.
The Anthem fellowships are designed to attract the highest caliber of doctoral students and to contribute significantly to Indiana's health information technology initiatives - a bridging of academia and the medical care industry.
The newly established fellowship programme also taps into the expertise of the nationally acclaimed Indiana Health Information Exchange, a collaboration of several Indiana medical care institutions whose goal is to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health care and to expand opportunities for researchers.
Health informatics is the application of skills and tools which enable information to be collected, managed, used and shared to support the delivery of health care and to promote health.
Recipients of the Anthem Fellowships focus on the challenges and issues critical to using clinical data to improve the population's health and wellness.
Carney was selected by a review panel including informatics executive associate dean Darrell Bailey; Anna McDaniel, director of the school's health informatics graduate programme; IHIE president J Marc Overhage, in consultation with David Lee, vice president of health care management for Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Indiana.
"This is a tremendous honor and I look forward to the opportunities and challenges looming ahead for me," said Carney, a public health informatics specialist and project manger for business development at the Atlanta-based CDC.
Carney's experience in health care began with his tour of duty as a corpsman for the US Navy in the mid-1980s.
The Jersey City, native went on to receive a bachelor's degree in political science at Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a master's in public health at Tulane University, New Orleans.
In 2003, he earned a master's in business administration at the Keller Graduate School of Management in Atlanta.
The School of Informatics at IUPUI is located near the IU schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, and health and rehabilitation sciences.
The campus also is home to the internationally acclaimed Regenstrief Institute, and the Regenstrief Medical Records System - the largest and longest continually operating electronic medical record systems in the world.
