
Su Chen
Clinical Science Principal, Public Health, Environmental and Life Sciences
Dr. Su Chen is an emergency medicine physician and computer scientist, experienced with managing large teams in a nationwide healthcare system. She applies technology to create solutions to optimize healthcare performance and quality.
As clinical director and program manager of health data standard HL7 CodeX™ FHIR Accelerator, Chen is building a stakeholder community of health systems, researchers, vendors, payers, care teams, and patients to advance interoperability across the healthcare ecosystem for oncology, genomics, and cardiovascular health. Her work in data standards and health IT capabilities helps advance the national Cancer Moonshot—with a goal to cut cancer death rates by at least 50 percent in the next 25 years.
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I'm Su Chen.
I'm a clinical science principal here at MITRE in digital health on the Bedford, Massachusetts campus.
The work of mCODE and CodeX was sponsored by MITRE's research program.
MITRE and its partners developed mCODE, a common data language for a cancer.
So as a patient, it's really difficult, right?
You go to your doctor and you feel like you have to re-explain what your prior doctor or another specialist has already done for you.
But when it comes to cancer, mCODE allows us to speak via a common language, so that no matter what you're doing in health, be it research, patient care, trying to get something paid for or approved, you can use mCODE to speak easily throughout, so that you can focus on health and not the process of trying to get your health taken care of.
CodeX is a not-for-profit, member-driven community.
We are singularly focused on advancing data centers like mCODE, so that as patients, we can have the care and research journeys that we deserve and truly should expect.
When it comes to the healthcare community, there's so many times when you're faced with this tangled web of next steps or transactions that you have to figure out just to do something simple that you feel like your patient needs.
Let's take the focus from their healthcare community back to focusing on our patients and not on process.
mCODE and CodeX, we've been able to start to see success in ways that have been difficult and not seen before when tackling this long-standing problem in healthcare data sharing.
And we've been able to do this by leveraging MITRE's long-standing experience and expertise as a trusted advisor, as an expert convener of community stakeholders.
Looking ahead, we're going to double down on that success that we've had in cancer, and now make great strides in our new growth areas, in genomics and cardiovascular health, and how we apply this to patients with Alzheimer's and dementia.
The aspects of my work here at MITRE that I find rewarding is this ultimate aim in everything I do in promoting the public good, especially for patients and for their healthcare providers.
MITRE's workplace culture fosters a special kind of energy.
Every team I've been on, every single person, had the ultimate aim and driving commitment to do the public good.
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