Columbia Wins $5 Million Grant for Online Project Proposal An online medical information system proposed by Columbia was one of a handful of winners of the Digital Libraries Initiative, a competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The competition called on universities to create new ways to make the Internet useful and accessible to more people. Columbia won in the medicine category and will receive $5 million over five years to develop its proposal. Columbia’s entry, PERSIVAL (Personalized Retrieval and Summarization of Image, Video, And Language resources), is a proposed online resource designed to provide personalized health information at the point of care to both the patient and clinician. The system will create customized online searches and relevant health care updates for each patient according to his or her personal file at New York Presbyterian Hospital. PERSIVAL will also be helpful to non-Columbia end-users, because it can create a new personal file by asking a series of medical questions. “Medical information can be complex ... sometimes beyond the understanding of the lay patient,” says Kathleen McKeown, chairwoman of the Department of Computer Science and the project’s principal investigator. Her research team hopes PERSIVAL will make medical information more accessible. Members of the team include James Cimino, assistant professor of medicine and medical informatics; Judith Klavans, director of Columbia’s Center for Research Information Access; and Desmond Jordan, associate professor of clinical anesthesiology. The Center for Advanced Technology (CAT) was involved in developing the PERSIVAL proposal. It helped establish strategic alliances with businesses that can help make PERSIVAL a reality. “The companies we’ve partnered with, such as AT&T, Bell Atlantic, General Electric, IBM, Lucent, and Welch Allyn, are contributing in several ways—in some cases providing hardware and software tools we need to put this project together,” says David Liss, CAT executive director. |R