Ad Hoc Advisors

Bryant Karras, MD
Assistant Professor, Department of Health Services, School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Division of Bio-Medical and Health Informatics, School of Medicine, University of Washington

Dr. Karras completed a fellowship in medical informatics at Yale University after earning a degree in biomedical engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a medical degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He authored a handbook on Medical Decision Making and published articles on the hand held implementation of clinical practice guidelines. Dr. Karras also researches the use of Internet technology to improve surveillance information collection in communicable (including bio-terrorism syndromic surveillance) and chronic diseases. He is a member of American Medical Informatics Association, Society for Medical Decision Making, and the American College of Physicians. Dr. Karras participated in a number of projects at Yale:

• As a member of the ambulatory care information system team, he had an active role in implementing Medicalogic’s Logician electronic medical record in outpatient clinics of Yale-New Haven Hospital.
• He worked on the Yale Center for Medical Informatics (YCMI) Guideline Elements Model (GEM). GEM is an XML based approach to organizing and storing information contained in clinical practice guidelines.
• He also worked on the design, refinement, and implementation of PalmAsthma, a handheld computing application that supports the chronic care of asthmatic children.
• He contributed to the design and refinement of Trial/DB, a protocol authoring tool and clinical trials management tool.

Community of Science Page for Dr. Karras

Jean Wooldridge, MPH
Strategic Advisor for Cancer Communication Technologies, Office of the Director of the Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute

Ms. Wooldridge is currently on loan to the NCI from FHCRC, where she is involved in strategic planning. She focuses on developing partnerships and dialogue across public and private sectors. Ms. Wooldridge is a founding board member of the non-profit E-Health Institute (EHI), formerly the Institute for Interactive Health Communications, directed by Dr. Tom Eng. She has served in cancer communications and research at the FHCRC for the past 20 years as Director of the Pacific Regional Cancer Information Service (CIS), under NCI contract. She is recognized as a leader in technological innovation, from the national CIS network’s first computerized database in 1983 to an online component of a 1998 CDC demonstration project for reaching rural Native American tribes in the Northwest.

She has presented at the DHHS early Partnerships conferences, the MIT Media Lab, and has served on conference and policy committees and informal advising with all four sectors:

• Government (clinical trials, Healthy People 2010, Partnerships conferences, NCI)
• Policy groups (IEEE)
• Non-profits (Council for the Individual and Technology)
• Industry groups (TEDMED3)

Her interests include consumer health informatics; the leveraging of nonprofit and profit partnerships and applications for cross-sector collaborations; and agent technology, decision support, simulation, and graphical display of complex data for general, rural, and medically underserved populations.

Home page for Ms. Wooldridge

Hendrika Meischke, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Health Services, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington

Dr. Meischke lends expertise in communications science to inHealth. She has a strong background in the design and evaluation of health communication campaigns (including several cancer prevention campaigns) as well as research on cancer-related information seeking, health-related contents in entertainment media and impact of media messages on viewer’s perceptions of risky behaviors. She has a strong interest in theory development within health promotion and cancer communications.

Home page for Dr. Meischke

Doug Brock, PhD
Assistant Professor, Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics, University of Washington

Dr. Brock provides expertise in usability testing and evaluation. After 3 years at Microsoft, he joined the department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics at the UW School of Medicine. He specializes in research usability, participative design, user interface design, web-based simulations, and development of emerging technology evaluation methodologies.