Annual Conference on Health Information Technology & Analytics (CHITA)

The annual Conference on Health IT & Analytics (CHITA) supports the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ’s) efforts to produce and disseminate evidence around the evolving digital healthcare ecosystem, including how to best advance the quality, safety, and effectiveness of healthcare for patients and their families. The meeting aims to formulate a health information technology (IT) research agenda, empower the next generation of health IT and analytics (HIT+A) researchers, foster a cross-disciplinary research community, and disseminate outputs and knowledge from the meeting. This grant supported the 2018-2020 CHITA meetings.

CHITA was created to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and communication in HIT+A research by providing a forum for knowledge gathering, sharing, and dissemination. For the 2018-2020 meetings, CHITA solicited papers around a range of HIT+A topics and connected HIT+A academic disciplines with policymakers, funders, practitioners, patient advocates, and industry professionals, to promote a robust dialog between these groups. Topics included the support of a learning health system representing a variety of fields, such as health services research, informatics, medicine, computer science, public health, business, and economics.

The specific aims of the research were the following:

• Formulate a HIT+A research agenda.
• Empower the next generation of HIT+A researchers.
• Foster a cross-disciplinary research community.
• Disseminate knowledge.

The 2-day annual meeting was organized around regular sessions, panels, lightning talks, and keynote presentations, with a pre-conference doctoral consortium aimed toward empowering the next generation of HIT+A researchers. Over 130 research papers were presented and debated. CHITA brought together a robust range of agencies and Federal departments including AHRQ, Department of Health & Human Services Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Federal Trade Commission, Maryland Health Care Commission, National Library of Medicine, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid. From each of the meetings, a research agenda identifying trends and knowledge gaps was produced, and proceedings of abstracts were disseminated.

With the presentation of over 130 research papers and the dissemination of yearly HIT+A research agendas, the findings from the annual CHITA informed a broad range of policymakers and stakeholders on the trends and knowledge gaps in HIT+A.