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Catherine K Craven, PhD, MA, MLS, FAMIA

Assistant Professor of Informatics

Dr. Catherine K. Craven, PhD, MA, MLS, FAMIA, is an assistant professor of Informatics, in the Division of Clinical Research Informatics in the Department of Population Health, Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine, at University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio (UTHSCSA). Before joining UTHSCSA in February 2021, she was a Senior Clinical Research Informaticist at Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS), New York City, for four years, where she was a member of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Science; the Clinical Informatics Group, IT Department; and co-led the Gastroenterology Division's Quality Improvement Team as lead Informaticist. Her work has focused on infrastructure optimization, and she conducts research in the area of Clinical Research Informatics surrounding research data warehousing practices, and clinical data quality and reproducibility for secondary research use. She led an NIH CTSA Informatics Domain Task Force (iDTF) and NIH CD2H leadership-approved survey on data warehousing practices and data quality completed by almost all CTSAs, with manuscripts in process. She is co-author on sister qualitative project Phase I manuscript with the leads for the CTSA Informatics Enterprise Community's Enterprise Data Warehouse for Research WG, for which a Phase II manuscript is now underway. Dr. Craven is a member of the CD2H Common Data Model-FHIR Gap Analysis Task Team and co-leads the CD2H Data Harmonization Change Management and Sustainability Task Team. She also conducts Clinical Informatics research using sociotechnical, human factors, and implementation science approaches, including usability testing methods, with emphases in clinical decision support and patient engagement. Dr. Craven successfully directed a Spanish langauge-preferred patient navigator program at MSHS. The navigator program aided these patients, who comprise ~25% of MSHS patients, in enagaging with health information via their patient portal accounts and the OpenNotes (ON) function in them, via a grant she and the MSHS Chief Medical Information Officer were awarded by the New York State Health Foundation. The ON founders group at BIDMC-Harvard called this work “ground-breaking," and invited her to participate in a diagnostic error and OpenNotes study involving Spanish-language preferred patients, which is in progress now. Prior to completing her doctoral degree, she was a Clinical Informationist at Johns Hopkins Medicine, a medical librarian-in-context collaborating with researcher-clinicians. She was a core Welch member to develop and operationlaize the Welch Embedded Informationist Service model based on the concept by Davidoff and Florance (2000). The idea of constructing measures for informationist “embeddness” is a concept and term that she coined. While at Hopkins, she led a Clinical Informatics Research Administration project for the JHM Research Deans, worked with the JHM Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Committee to develop an Infobuttons-type CDS intervention in the EHR, and re-designed a service-operations tracking and reporting database. To further focus on Informatics, she undertook a Health Informatics PhD, newly available at University of Missouri (MU). During her doctoral program, she worked as MU’s REDCap Adminstrator and the Project Director to create a REDCap web-based data collection and reporting application for use by all social workers and administrators in the State of Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services Child and Maternal Health Home Visting Program. While MSHS was creating a position for her, she served as short-term NIH Scientific Review Officer hired for her Informatics background to work on review processes for the Precision Medicine Initiative (now called "All of Us"), and the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes Initiative. She was twice an NIH National Library of Medicine Biomedical and Health Informatics Research Fellow at the University of Missouri. Dr. Craven is a long-time member of the American Medical Informatics Association, in which currently holds several leadership positions, including membership on the AMIA Public Policy Committee and the Board-appointed Task Force on AMIA Governance.