July 2026: CIRG's Washington Health Summary named as one of 9 EHIgnite Challenge winners

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CIRG

we design, develop, and operate information systems that improve individual and population health.

What We Do

CIRG designs, develops, builds, and operates information systems that securely manage health information for projects in the Clinical, Public Health, and Global Health Informatics domains.

We collaborate with colleagues at the University of Washington, in national and state governments, at other universities, and at health care and research organizations across the US and around the world.

Dr. Bill Lober, who leads our team, practiced both emergency medicine and computer engineering before shifting his focus to applied health informatics, which he claims is the most fun he's ever had... Our staff consists of software developers, system programmers, experts in interaction design/usability and health data system operations, and we work with both graduate and undergraduate students. We are proud of the work we do, and of the ways in which we impact people's health.

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Clinical Informatics

Computerized PROs (cprohealth.org)  Behind much of our Patient-Reported Outcomes (PRO) work, as well as both self-management and behavior change interventions built on our PRO assessments, we use an open source platform, which we make available on github, and which we've been using and developing continuously since 2001. Lots more details and examples at the cprohealth.org site

Patient-Reported Outcomes for HIV Care   In partnership with ViiV Healthcare, we make available to clinical partners an HIV-focussed Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) system to elicit and assess the patient’s experience of clinically important issues, using brief, validated questionnaires. PROs provide the patient perspective of the effects of disease and treatment on well-being, function, symptoms, satisfaction with (and preference for) treatments, risky behaviors (such as substance abuse), and other outcomes.

IRONMAN (Movember)   TrueNTH (true north) is a program funded by the Movember Foundation. TrueNTH brings together men, partners, caregivers, clinicians and researchers to test new care interventions and then scale them nationally and internationally and implement national & international clinical quality initiatives that will significantly reduce variation in treatment quality & outcomes.

View All Clinical Projects

Global Health Informatics

The UW Digital Initiatives Group   is lead by Jan Flowers. DIGI and CIRG collaborate closely, and CIRG staff and leadership have been deeply involved in past work on OpenMRS, OpenELIS and other projects. DIGI staff support CIRG projects such as Washington Health Summary and COSRI. DIGI's portfolio, and some of our collaborations, are detailed on their web site

goto digi.uw.edu

Public Health Informatics

COSRI - WA DOH Support Act Opioids   COSRI is an Integrated application for accessing PMP. It provides decision support based on WA rules and CDC guidelines, and decreases overhead and cost barriers associated with vendor-based EHR-integrated applications. It is open source, with no license fees to use. COSRI extends and contextualizes software from CDSConnect project, led by AHRQ and CDC. Overarching funding to improve PMP usage comes from the CMS Support ACT through the Washington Healthcare Authority. Project in partnership with Washington State Department of Health.

StayHome - A Coronavirus Symptom Tracking Application   StayHome (stayhome.app) is a mobile app that supports for people who want to find reliable information and resources, track symptoms and temperature, and record COVID-19 testing and results, and who may choose to share that information with public health agencies. You can create an account to start self-tracking. You can access resources about COVID-19 even if you don’t have an account. You can learn more about the app and its features at project.stayhome.app. New features and content are being added as we continue to make StayHome a go-to resource you can count on.

Interoperability for Public Health   Since 2006, we have developed public health interoperability software to demonstrate use cases in surveillance and case reporting. We develop using standards based profiles (ihe.net), and test our work with commercial vendor systems. Then, on behalf of CDC and Washington Department of Health, we demonstrate novel data integration examples at conferences such as HIMSS, CDC PHIC, CSTE, and ISDS, showing how informatics supports the essential services of public health .

View All Public Health Projects

Publications

Our academic work, and work based on systems we've built and managed with collaborators

It's hard to keep publications up to date, and we have not updated our publications list since early 2024. Just too busy... In the meantime, Bill is an author on many, but not all, of the publications which use our work. You can find a curated bibliography for him here:

You can find our pre-March 2024 publications system here:

Who We Are

Faculty & Staff

Staff Alumni

Student Alumni