Student Scholarship Recipient 2014-2015

Polina Kukhareva, MS. MPH, PhD Candidate, Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah

Polina was born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She received a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree at UNC-Chapel Hill as a Fulbright Scholar. Her passion for health IT brought her to the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah, where she began a PhD fellowship with Dr. Kawamoto as her faculty advisor.

Polina plans to develop an innovative framework combining automated clinical decision support (CDS) and clinical quality measurement (QM). It has been shown that evidence-based medicine and standardization of healthcare practices improves quality of health care. CDS helps clinicians follow the best practice guidelines, and QM shows the rate of compliance with those guidelines. Our research can benefit many patients. She has submitted a paper entitled ‘Clinical Decision Support-based Quality Measurement (CDS-QM) Framework: Prototype Implementation, Evaluation, and Future Directions’ to the 2014 AMIA conference.   

We are excited to have Polina as a new member of the UHIMSS Student Liaison Committee.  Congratulations Polina and best wishes in your academic studies.