Administrative Contact
Biography
Rachel Richesson is a Professor in the Department of Learning Health Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Michigan. She holds a PhD and MS in Health Informatics and a Masters of Public Health from the University of Texas.
Dr. Richesson conducts original research on the quality and usability of data from electronic health records (EHRs) for research, and has fostered numerous interdisciplinary research collaborations. She has directed implementation of data standards for a number of multi-national multi-site clinical research and epidemiological studies, including the NIH Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network, Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, and The Environmental Determinants of Diabetes in the Young (TEDDY) study, and the national distributed Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network (PCORnet).
Dr. Richesson currently leads the EHR Core for the NIH Health Systems Research Collaboratory, which is developing standards and quality metrics for clinical phenotyping using EHR data in pragmatic clinical trials. In addition, she and Department of Learning Health Science chair Charles Friedman co-lead the multi-stakeholder “Mobilizing Computable Biomedical Knowledge” (MCBK) community charged with establishing the standards, policies, and governance needed for biomedical knowledge to be widely disseminated and applied.
Social media @rrichesson (Twitter)
Areas of Interest
Research and Scholarly Interests
Dr. Richesson’s research interests include biomedical informatics (including Clinical Research Informatics and Public Health Informatics), evaluating and implementing data standards (including terminologies and classifications such as SNOMED CT, ICD, LOINC, RxNorm, CTCAE and MedDRA, and condition-specific ‘common data elements’), knowledge representation (including formal ontologies, heterogeneous data integration), the design of patient registries, and rare diseases research advocacy.
Subject-Matter Expertise
Data representation, data harmonization, data standardization, pragmatic research design, clinical decision support, team science
Other professional highlights
- Editor of Springer Clinical Informatics textbook: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319987781
- Elected Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI, 2014)
- Chair, Scientific Program Committee, Clinical Research Informatics Summit, supported by the American Medical Informatics Association, April 7-11, 2014, San Francisco, CA.
Published Articles or Reviews
Andrews JE, Richesson RL, Krischer J. Variation of SNOMED CT Coding of Clinical Research Concepts among Coding Experts. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2007; 14:497-506. PMID: 17460128
Richesson RL, Krischer JP. Data Standards in Clinical Research: Gaps, Overlaps, Challenges and Future Directions. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2007; 14(6):687-696. PMID: 17712081
Richesson RL, Fung KW, Krischer JP. Heterogeneous but “Standard” Coding Systems for Adverse Events: Issues in Achieving Interoperability between Apples and Oranges. Journal of Contemporary Clinical Trials 2009; 29(5): 635-45. PMID: 18406213
Richesson RL, Malloy JF, Paulus K, Krischer JP. An Automated Standardized System for Managing Adverse Events in Clinical Research Networks. Drug Safety 2008; 31(10):807-822. PMID: 18759506
Richesson RL. Data Standards in Diabetes Patient Registries. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology 2011; 5(3):476-85. PMID: 21722563
Richesson RL, Shereff DE, Andrews JE. Standardization of Questions in Rare Disease Registries: The PRISM Library Project. Interact J Med Res. 2012 Jul-Dec; 1(2): e10. PMCID: PMC ID:3626121
Richesson RL, Hammond WE, Nahm M, Wixted D, Simon GE, Robinson JG, Bauck AE, Cifelli D, Smerek MM, Dickerson J, Laws RL, Madigan RA, Rusincovitch SA, Kluchar C, Califf RM. Electronic health records based phenotyping in next-generation clinical trials: A perspective from the NIH Health Care Systems Collaboratory. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2013. Dec;20(e2):e226-31. doi: 10.1136/amiajnl-2013-001926. Epub 2013 Aug 16. PMID: 23956018
*Richesson RL, Rusincovitch SA, Wixted D, Batch BC, Feinglos MN, Miranda ML, Hammond WE, Califf RM, Spratt SE. A Comparison of Phenotype Definitions for Diabetes Mellitus. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2013 Dec;20(e2):e319-26. PMID: 24026307
Richesson RL. An Informatics Framework for the Standardized Collection and Analysis of Medication Data in Networked Research. Journal of Biomedical Informatics 2014. PMID: 24434192.
Richesson RL, Horvath M, Rusincovitch SA. Clinical Research Informatics and Electronic Health Record Data. 2014 IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics. [Invited manuscript] PMID: 25123746
Richesson RL, Chute CG. Health information technology data standards get down to business: maturation within domains and the emergence of interoperability. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 2015; May;22(3):492-4. PMID: 25981416
* Richesson RL, Staes CJ, Douthit B, Thoureen T, Hatch D, Kawamoto K, Del Fiol G. Measuring Implementation Feasibility of Clinical Decision Support Alerts for Clinical Practice Recommendations. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 27, Issue 4, April 2020, Pages 514–521. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocz225
