As director of the Center for Population Health Informatics at the Institute for Informatics, Randi Foraker helps improve the health of the community through data and support data access, analytics, and dissemination efforts. She specializes in the design of population-based studies and the integration of electronic health record data with socioeconomic indicators, and her research portfolio has been supported by a combination of governmental and industry grants and contracts. Her research has focused on the application of clinical decision support to complement risk scoring in primary care, cardiology and oncology.
During the COVID pandemic, Foraker served as principal investigator of the COVID umbrella IRB leveraging electronic health record data at Washington University in St. Louis and works closely with investigators who conduct research using data from our COVID Data Commons, which is maintained by I2. Foraker chairs the Epidemiology Strike Force and convenes members of the St. Louis City, St. Louis County, Jefferson County, Franklin County, and St. Charles County Departments of Public Health on a weekly basis along with academic, health system, and business partners to assist with their data architecture, management, and analytic needs during the pandemic and beyond. In 2022, Foraker was named a fellow at the American College of Medical Informatics, part of the American Medical Informatics Association.