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Research Projects

Alicanto

Yuri Quintana leads the Alicanto platform (http://www.alicantocloud.com) that supports health professionals' online collaborations to develop and disseminate standardized care pathways and have online virtual tumor boards. Alicanto has online meeting spaces, private groups with shared documents, online discussion forums, and a clinical case consultation system.  Several Harvard-affiliated hospitals in pediatrics and cancer are using Alicanto.  Learn more about Alicanto.

DCI Network

The DCI  Network is an invitation-only consortium founded by the Division of Clinical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School affiliate. The Network unites academic medical centers, biopharma, health tech, patient groups, and regulators to co-design and pilot solutions for high-impact healthcare challenges, including rare and hard-to-treat diseases. Learn more at https://www.dcinetwork.org 

DCI Network Flagship Projects

  • Collaborative Longitudinal Data Platform: Integrates multimodal patient data (EHR, labs, imaging, wearables, PROs) across institutions to support personalized, longitudinal care.
  • EMPATHICA: A patient-centered AI chatbot delivering clear, empathetic medication guidance while collecting home-based symptom data—tested in cancer, adaptable for rare disease care.
  • AI Hypothesis Generation for Hard-to-Treat Conditions: Multi-agent AI tools create original research plans when no trials or therapies are available. Human-in-the-loop design enables use in rare neurodegenerative and immune-mediated diseases.

Machine Learning

Steven Horng is Clinical Lead, Machine Learning, Center for Healthcare Delivery Science at BIDMC  and collaborates on MIT AI researchers. See his work on AI and Sepsis and AI and COVID-19 Forecasting.

BIDMC @ Home

Seth Berkowitz lead a multidisciplinary effort to build and deploy BIDMC@home, a revolutionary mobile application that engages patients in their own health care and extends the continuity of care beyond the bounds of the hospital and physicians' office. See details here.

InfoSAGE

Yuri Quintana leads the InfoSAGE platform, Information Sharing Across Generations (https://www.infosagehealth.org), which is a federally funded research project that aims to study the information needs of elders and their adult children who are involved in their care by building a “living laboratory”. InfoSAGE allows us to study real-life situations of elders and the challenges that families face in communicating, coordinating, and collaborating with complex and costly care environments. Learn more about InfoSAGE.

Leveraging electronic health records and medical claims to repurpose drugs to treat Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, and COVID-19

In a project led by MIT professors Roy Welsch and Stan Finkelstein, researchers will use statistics, machine learning, and simulated clinical drug trials to find and test already-approved drugs as potential therapeutics against COVID-19. Researchers will sift through millions of electronic health records and medical claims for signals indicating that drugs used to fight chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and gastric influx might also work against COVID-19 and other diseases.

Pathology Informatics

Ramy Arnaout's laboratory uses computational biology, mathematics, physics, and engineering to understand complex systems in biology, genomics, and medicine, with a focus on high-throughput immune repertoire genomic sequencing (systems biology of the immune system) and big data clinical data analytics. See more at http://arnaoutlab.org.

Undiagnosed Diseases Network

Alexa McCray served as a Principal Investigator of the US-wide Undiagnosed Diseases Network. This NIH research study seeks to provide answers for patients and families affected by undiagnosed conditions.