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Upcoming SDRF Webinar

"Insights into clinical data input and translation: Impact on Research"

June 10, 2025 4:00 - 5:00 PM EST

Featured Speaker 

Amol Bhalla, MD, M.Sci, MHSA, MBA

Chief Informaticist of IMO Health

Clinical data do not emerge fully formed in research-ready shape—their journey begins with syntax and concludes with semantics. In this talk, I guide the audience through that voyage, starting with the “plumbing” of healthcare IT: HL7 v2, FHIR resources, CDA documents, and the workflow constraints that shape what clinicians type or click. These syntactic details—how a blood pressure reading is tokenized, which code systems are permitted in a drop-down—determine whether downstream tools even recognize the observation at all, much less treat it consistently across sites.

From there, we pivot to the semantic layer, demonstrating how terminologies such as SNOMED CT, LOINC, and IMO’s interface terminology transform raw messages into computable meaning. A cancer registry case study makes the stakes tangible: you extract “gastric antrum…”, an unambiguous concept, but it gains meaning and context after NLP, large language model disambiguation, and IMO concept normalization are applied. The payoff is dramatic—cleaner cohorts, faster study start-up, and reduced abstraction overhead—yet the example also reveals how fragile research pipelines can remain when either syntax or semantics is neglected.

The session closes by offering a practical “balancing checklist.” Attendees’ learning involves maintaining a balance between syntactic rigor and semantic richness. The central message is simple: striking a balance between the two is no longer a nice-to-have but a prerequisite for reproducible, multisite, AI-ready science.