Wendy Webber Chapman
Biomedical Informaticist
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Address:
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
A Bit About Me
I stumbled onto biomedical informatics after studying Linguistics and Chinese. My husband entered the field and introduced me to natural language processing, which applies linguistics to healthcare data. It's been 30 years since I started a PhD program at the University or Utah with Peter Haug and under the leadership of Homer Warner. Through a winding path that took me to Pittsburgh, San Diego, Utah again to be the chair of the department I graduated from, and now Melbourne, Australia, I've sought impact in healthcare through analysis of clinical data and implementation of technology.
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I led the Biomedical Language Understanding Lab (BLULab), and worked with many wonderful people to develop algorithms, annotation schemas and information models, and datasets. When I tried to implement our tools into practice, I came face to face with the principle I understood only in theory: technical accuracy is only one tiny piece of the picture. We hadn't paid a lot of attention to questions like
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Do users even need what we are building? What problem are we solving?
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How would the NLP application fit into a larger ecosystem of tools?
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How would the application support human workflows?
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What is a feasible financial model for implementing and scaling the application?
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What difference will the NLP tool make to health or healthcare delivery?
This crisis of relevance caused me to pivot to leadership roles with the aim of supporting other researchers and innovators in thinking about these questions from the start, to design and develop digital interventions that are more likely to be successfully implemented in healthcare.​
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Career Summary
Throughout my career, I have mentored students and junior faculty members and collaborated with many people on my research.
2000 - 2010
University of Pittsburgh
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Assistant Professor
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Associate Director of the Training Program
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Member of the DBMI Steering Committee
2010 - 2013
University of California,
San Diego
- Associate Professor
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Member of the DBMI Executive Committee
2013 - 2019
University of Utah
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Professor
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Department Chair
2019 - present
University of Melbourne
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Professor
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Director, Centre for Digital Transformation of Health
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Co-developed the NegEx algorithm for determining whether a clinical condition is negated
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Extended the algorithm to other attributes like how much certainty is ascribed, whether it occurred in the past, and who experienced it (ConText algorithm). ConText has been translated into many other languages and applied around the world.
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Hosted a dataset of UPMC clinical notes and ICD codes for NLP research that was used by 600 researchers in the year it was available.
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Applied NLP to the field of disease surveillance with a focus on syndromic surveillance from chief complaint and ED notes.
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Developed and taught courses on NLP and biomedical informatics.
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Chaired the AMIA NLP Working Group
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Co-hosted ShARe and SemEval shared tasks that allowed researchers to compare performance of their algorithms on reference annotated datasets.
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Developed a set of NLP ontologies that provide templates for representing clinical events and entities, along with their attributes, to enable faster startup of an NLP project and sharing of NLP knowledge bases.
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Applied NLP to creating retrospective cohorts for comparative effectiveness studies.
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Created the Data Science Scholars Program to mentor and guide clinical scientists applying NLP to clinical notes.
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Led design and launch of a professional master's program in biomedical informatics and was the PI on the NLM training grant.
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Coordinated the ReimagineEHR program for development and implementation of SMART on FHIR apps with existing EHRs.
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Started and chaired the inaugural Women in AMIA committee and launched a podcast and a leadership program.
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Set up and built a new centre for informatics and digital health.
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Co-created the Digital Health Validitron, a research platform to support development and validation of digital health innovations for clinical settings.
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Launched the Learning Health System Academy for project-based training of clinicians selected by their healthcare organisations to become digital health champions, including a short course on Applied Learning Health Systems.
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