Home - Bell Eapen

About Me

I deliver health IT artifacts!

Bell Eapen MD, PhD.

Digital Health Consultant

Bellraj (Bell) Eapen is a techie physician with an MSc in eHealth and PhD in Information Systems from McMaster University. He is a proponent of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence applications in dermatology. He is proficient in open-source software development and maintains several software libraries on GitHub. He actively supports OSCAR and OpenMRS EMR platforms and is an advocate of FHIR, big data and blockchain adoption in healthcare. His research interests include Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Cutaneous Imaging, mHealth and Public Health Informatics. He has several peer-reviewed publications.

I help healthcare organizations solve problems related to interoperability and analytics through the adoption of FHIR and OMOP data models, mainly for OSCAR EMR and OpenMRS platforms. I facilitate the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence in healthcare organizations leveraging NLP on clinical records. As a consultant, I deliver prototypes & models instead of reports and recommendations! My GitHub repo at github.com/dermatologist has many sample projects.

Services

Things that I work on.

Clinical Decision Support Systems

Machine Learning Dermatology CDSS from text and images.

Data Warehousing

Data warehousing and health data analytics for healthcare organizations.

Health Information System Design

Designing HIS that fit into regional frameworks.

Customize Health Information Systems

Customize OSCAR, OpenMRS, DHIS2 and RedCap

ML & AI Research in Healthcare

Support ML and AI research in healthcare

Knowledge Management

Support Knowledge Management in healthcare using FHIR

Blog

My thoughts.

Clinical knowledge representation for reuse

Bell Eapen - April 28, 2021

The need for computerized clinical decision support is becoming increasingly obvious with the COVID-19 pandemic. The initial emphasis has been on ‘replacing’ the clinician which for a variety of reasons is impossible or impractical. Pragmatically, clinical decision support systems could provide clinical knowledge support for clinicians to make time-sensitive decisions with whatever information they have […]

SPQR10, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

COVID vaccination tracking with blockchain

Bell Eapen - March 24, 2021

COVID vaccine rollout has the potential to bring relief to billions of people around the world. But as encouraging as these programs may be, it is extremely important to note that a vaccine cannot be as effective if it is not effectively distributed and trusted by the public. IBM Blockchain has a vaccine distribution network […]

Chatting with FHIR endpoint

Bell Eapen - March 3, 2021

FHIR is an emerging standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. Searching for resources is fundamental to the mechanics of FHIR. Search operations traverse through an existing set of resources filtering by parameters supplied to the search operation. health information systems convert the clinicians’ interactions into the search string. With the growing importance (and intelligence) of […]

Siobhán Grayson, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Embeddings in healthcare: TypingDNA and Skinmesh

Bell Eapen - November 24, 2020

Neural networks (NN) are everywhere, from image analytics to NLP to clinical decision support systems. Embeddings are a popular class of techniques that emerged out of NN with diverse applications. embedding is a low-dimensional translation of high dimensional space. For clinicians, embedding is nothing but a simple representation of complex data. Embeddings are typically used […]

Google Nevit Dilmen Slawek Borewicz Commons-emblem-question blue / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Rendering FHIR Questionnaire for data capture

Bell Eapen - October 15, 2020

Standardized data collection forms are vital for health information systems. This is particularly true in public health, where there is a host of data collection forms shared by various organizations. InterRAI is a typical example. Standardization is important for collaborative data analytics at various levels, a need that became painfully apparent during the recent COVID-19 […]

Clinical Query Language – Part 1

Bell Eapen - August 5, 2020

Clinical Query Language (CQL) is a high-level query language to represent and generate unambiguous quality measures or clinical decision rules. I am not a CQL expert. These are my notes from a system development perspective. I am trying to make sense of this emerging concept and add my notes here in the hope that others […]

Bell Eapen