Laura Marcial, Ph.D., is a skilled health informatician who has been creating and assessing electronic health information tools for more than 20 years. She is an expert in the development and use of scientific data repositories and mobile devices and has developed a comprehensive research program on information search performance on desktop, tablet, and mobile computers. Her recent work focuses on the movement of data within the health care system and between health care and other services to support clinical decision support for challenging conditions, including pain management and complex chronic health conditions. As such, she develops tools and systems that are both patient and provider facing and that optimize interoperability, using multiple approaches, including FHIR. Recent work funded by AHRQ demonstrated the utility of a FHIR-based app to allow clinicians and patients to make informed decisions about managing pain using evidence based approaches that reflected patient preference and concerns.
Dr. Marcial has worked across sectors, including state-level public health and private health care systems. She is particularly committed to ensuring that informatics tools are equitable and accessible, and embeds user experience research into her research program. Her work spans development to evaluation and engages critical individuals at every step from concept to implementation and scale. She has been funded by the Office of the National Coordinator to support the development of a road map designed to support the safety of HealthIT, and to produce a change package of tools for local implementation of health IT initiatives to maximize usability.
She is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association, and she has taught a course in electronic health records at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
