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Associate Professor, Genetics 

Research Interests

Keywords: Clinical Trials and Research Informatics, Community-Based Research, Connected Health, Real-World Data, Digital Health, Interoperability, Data Standards Methodology, Interoperability, Data Integration, Data Analytics, Team Science

Lab Website

As a Clinical Research Informaticist, my research focuses on designing and testing methods to streamline the clinical and clinical trial process for the clinicians, research teams and study participants through enhanced interoperability.

Currently, participant access and participation in clinical trials and clinical care are often limited to geographic location and inconvenient procedures. The clinical and research teams encounter limited access to siloed data, and the data is often recollected in various settings. These challenges limit the visibility of a participant’s historical and current state of health. Improving access to data could add value to research, reduce data collection redundancy, improve data quality, and provide the opportunity to rapidly answer questions for clinicians, patients, and the community.

Data access involves enhancing system and data interoperability and requires standard methods for data exchange across organizations, common terminologies, and data standards. My research involves working with inter-disciplinary teams to design and test methods to facilitate interoperability and access to clinical research and its biomedical information.

As a leader in this field, I have collaborated with national and international stakeholders to develop global standards and methods. I serve as the Assistant Director for electronic health records initiatives such as the N3C-Clinical initiative, one of the largest publicly available COVID data resources in the United States, and I direct day-to-day operations for the All of Us Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data (CLAD). I am a founding member of Health Level Seven’s Vulcan Accelerator and a member of its Operations Committee supporting EHR integration in research, and I held leadership roles in Health Level Seven’s  (HL7) working groups. Additionally, I led global data operations for large-scale clinical trials conducted in over 25 countries, and I am an industry educator and trainer in clinical research informatics with the Society of Clinical Data Management (SCDM).

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Publications

Anita Walden in UNC Genetics News

Anita Walden
  • Genetics