Assistant Professor of Health Informatics at the School of Informatics and Computing, Dr. Brian Dixon, was recently named to “Indianapolis Business Journal’s” “Forty Under 40 list.
“I’m still in awe about this whole thing,” Dixon said. “When I saw the others on the list, including Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and author John Green, it hit me how big a deal this is.”
One of the biggest reasons Dixon is pleased with the honor is the potential to change public perception of his chosen field. “The recognition helps people understand that we are professionals, and it brings clarity to what our field is all about,” he said. “It highlights the fact that our work focuses on improving people’s health care outcomes, and to make information flow more seamlessly through the health care system.”
Dixon believes that informatics is reshaping health care on both personal and professional levels. “The information systems that we design and implement helps doctors and health care professionals make more effective decisions from both a safety and quality-of-care perspective,” he noted. “But it also helps us to evaluate the types of decisions that professionals make, so we can see how decisions get made, which helps us re-engineer health care delivery processes and services.”
When he was an undergraduate at DePauw University, Dixon aspired to be a dentist. However, he found himself more intrigued with information technology, which put him on the radar screen for the Regenstrief Institute, a health services research organization based at IUPUI. It was the right place at the right time for Dixon, who noted “my work at Regenstrief excited me like nothing else, and turned me onto the possibilities that existed in changing health care for the better.”
“In my opinion, this is one of the top five places in the country because our campus has the infrastructure to support our initiatives, one of the top medical schools in the country to conduct clinical trials, and a business community that is interested in our field and willing to push the envelope,” Dixon said. “That makes this a place that has the ability not only to come up with really good ideas, but to test them and bring them to life in the real world.”
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