Mental Health Informatics: Enabling a Learning Mental Healthcare System

Dr. Tenenbaum is in the Division of Translational Biomedical Informatics within the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Duke University. After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard, Dr. Tenenbaum worked as a program manager at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, WA for six years before earning a PhD in biomedical informatics at Stanford University. Her research applies expertise in data standards, electronic health records, and machine learning to stratify mental health disorders to enable precision medicine. She is also the informatics faculty lead for the Alzheimer’s Disease Metabolomics Consortium. Nationally, Dr. Tenenbaum has served on the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and serves on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Lister Hill Center at the National Library of Medicine. She is co-founder and past Chair of AMIA’s Mental Health Informatics Working Group. She has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the advisory panel for Nature Scientific Data. Beginning in 2019, Dr. Tenenbaum took a partial leave of absence from Duke to serve as Chief Data Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Ranallo is an applied clinical informatician dedicated to formalizing the field of mental health informatics. She completed her undergraduate training at UCLA where she performed basic laboratory research on the distribution of neuropeptides in the mammalian nervous system, and psychosocial research examining the effects of developmental trauma on children’s self-concept. She completed her PhD at the University of Minnesota where she worked to address gaps in technologies for knowledge representation in mental health. She has front line experience developing and implementing informatics strategies in a variety of research and clinical settings. She is committed to bringing the quality and safety of mental healthcare on par with that of general medical healthcare.