AI-enabled health data project wins 2026 AMIA signature award
Introduction
The interdisciplinary team behind Creating AI-Enabled All-Health Team Data Fabric, co-led by BHIS professor Andrew Boyd, has won the American Medical Informatics Association’s Patricia Flatley Brennan Award for Informatics Team Science.
CAIDF integrates health data derived from a broad range of health professionals — nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and speech and language pathologists — to develop patient health summaries that go beyond the insights of standard physicians’ notes to improve care and enable scientific discoveries. The project is a collaboration across universities and across UIC programs; faculty and students from BHIS, OT, PT, RS emergency medicine, pathology and computer sciences have contributed to CAIDF.
“This award is a wonderful acknowledgment of what we have accomplished over the last two years by bringing together a team with diverse expertise and talent to solve complex challenges, funded by ARPA-H,” said Boyd. “AI needs to examine nursing, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech and language pathology with physician data to improve health for all.”
The AMIA awards program recognizes members for significant contributions to the field of informatics, celebrating the leadership, innovation, scientific achievement and dedication shaping the future of healthcare. The 2026 Patricia Flatley Brennan Award for Informatics Team Science will be presented to the CAIDF project leads — Boyd, Catherine Craven of University of Missouri/University of Texas at Austin and Karen Dunn Lopez of University of Iowa — during the AMIA 2026 Annual Symposium, Nov. 7-11 in Dallas, Texas.
“This recognition truly highlights the power of team science at UIC and across collaborating institutions,” said PT professor and CAIDF collaborator Tanvi Bhatt, “where diverse clinical, research and computational expertise comes together to address important healthcare challenges.”