Sachin Kheterpal is Associate Dean for Research Information Technology at the University of Michigan Medical School, as well as  Professor of Anesthesiology. He is responsible, as Associate Dean, for establishing the vision and strategy to effectively use information technology to improve patient care and outcomes at Michigan Medicine as well as advance its research mission. He is a national leader in perioperative large dataset clinical research. Using innovative techniques to integrate administrative, EHR, and registry data across institutions, he leads the Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group; it has accumulated more than twelve million patient records with risk-adjusted outcomes and detailed clinical intervention data spanning more than 50 health systems across the United States and Europe for outcomes research and quality improvement. Prior to joining Michigan Medicine, he was the lead architect of a leading commercially available clinical information system: General Electric Centricity. He led the global clinical information system product development team at GE Healthcare IT. His nearly two decades of informatics, software development, and business administration experience has proved invaluable to perioperative outcomes research here. He holds B.S., M.D. (1999), and M.B.A. degrees from the University of Michigan.

Consumers are increasingly turning to wearable devices to learn more about everything from their heart rate to sleep quality. Yet, the question remains: what can all of this data tell us about people’s overall health? Michigan Medicine has launched a study to discover if data collected on Apple Watch, combined with other health information, can provide insight into health, wellness and disease.

The three-year study, called MIPACT (Michigan Predictive Activity and Clinical Trajectories), is already underway, with 1,000 participants enrolled as of March 2019. It aims to enroll thousands more patients at Michigan Medicine over the next year. 

“With the breadth of scientific expertise at [Michigan Medicine],” notes our speaker, “we are uniquely positioned to explore how to integrate knowledge gained across participant surveys, medical records, wearables, genomics, and lab tests to better understand daily experiences and long-term health.” The resulting data will be made available to participants and researchers who are studying health information, daily activity, wearable signals, and participant-reported quality of life. Apple is collaborating with Michigan Medicine to conduct this study, and a subset of the data will be available to Apple researchers.

MIPACT is built upon experience gained from the enrollment of 60,000 participants over the last six years of the Michigan Genomics Initiative, part of Precision Health at the University of Michigan, as well as the infrastructure of the Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research. 

Of primary concern to our speaker and his fellow investigators is assuring participants that their data is secure. Both “Michigan Medicine and Apple are focused on participant data privacy and security,” our speaker has emphasized. Both have “implemented several new systems to maximize privacy.”