Dr. Khyzer Aziz, assistant professor of pediatrics and general internal medicine, is a neonatologist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of premature babies or newborns with high-risk or complex health conditions. He was recently named Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Chief Medical Information Officer.
He received his medical degree from the University of Florida College of Medicine, trained at the Jacobi Medical Center in New York, and completed a pediatrics fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine before becoming a Johns Hopkins faculty member in 2020.
Dr. Aziz excels in medical and technological innovation, with expertise in machine learning, data science, and ethics. He is director of the Johns Hopkins NICU Precision Medicine Center of Excellence, associate director of the BIDS Master of Science in Applied Health Sciences Informatics Programs, and is the chief medical information officer (CMIO) for Johns Hopkins Hospital. As CMIO, Dr. Aziz leverages emerging technologies like generative AI to enhance delivery of advanced patient care in a digital era.
In his research, Dr. Aziz uses complex information found in electronic medical records and national registries/databases to provide clear, cohesive, and concise information for patients, families, and clinicians that can be used for clinical decision-making, patient classification and subgrouping, and future clinical trial design.
Dr. Aziz and his research team realized that the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM), a standard for observational health data, could help them pioneer processes for automated neonatal data collection. The OMOP CDM is managed by Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI). Dr. Aziz reflects, “Given the lack of level one evidence in neonatal care coupled with variations in care practices and outcomes, utilizing large observational data sets provides an opportunity to better understand neonatal outcomes.” His team has secured several big grants, including funding to establish Maternal Health Research Centers of Excellence and the Center for Disease Control’s Pregnant People-Infant Linked Longitudinal Surveillance grant. With this funding support, clinical, research, and IT teams will work to improve maternal health through data innovation, collection, and infrastructure.
Dr. Aziz’s overarching aim is to bridge medical expertise with emerging technologies to enhance pediatric care. He aims to streamline technology, improve counseling and quality initiatives for pre- and postnatal care, and build predictive models for diseases. Overall, the intent is to use emerging technologies and data science to develop cost-effective models resulting in better care for patients and families. “Using informatics helps decrease the cognitive burden on the healthcare workers who provide care,” Dr. Aziz says. “These technologies allow us to interact more with our colleagues, fostering new relationships, while simultaneously helping us be more present when caring for our patients.”