Arlene Chung, MD, MHA, MMCi, assistant professor in the division of general medicine and pediatrics, has been selected to receive a Jefferson Pilot Award for her research that seeks to develop novel statistical and visualization approaches to enable precision lifestyle recommendations.
This research is focused on patients with inflammatory bowel diseases and leverages prior work from IBD Partners, which is a PCORI-funded patient-powered research network. Chung and her team plan to develop innovative preprocessing, machine learning, and visualization methods to leverage patient-generated health data more effectively. Additionally, she will develop a software platform called Precision VISSTA to allow for data exploration through interactive visualizations to examine various types of patient-generated health data from wearable devices and apps that measure physical activity and sleep.
The selection committee highlighted the development of software for patient-generated health data exploration and predictions to be particularly of promise as Chung’s efforts will be valuable in combing heterogeneous data from numerous patients into an integrated platform to enable knowledge discovery at both individual patient and cohort levels. Precision VISSTA, as a software platform, seeks to present results in novel visual formats to make insights about individual patients more accessible to healthcare providers.
The annual Jefferson Pilot award is given to junior faculty members to recognize both past performance and future promise in research.
Dr. Chung is also Associate Director of the Program on Health and Clinical Informatics and maintains an active primary care clinical practice focused on the care of complex patients with cancer and multiple chronic conditions. She also serves as the Lead Informatics Physician for Patient Engagement for UNC Health Care. Learn more about Dr. Chung here.