The Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is a leader in biomedical informatics and artificial intelligence in medicine. Founded in 1994 and embedded within the world’s leading pediatric hospital, CHIP brings together medicine, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, data science, epidemiology, genomics, and policy to improve care, accelerate discovery, and strengthen health systems. At Boston Children’s Hospital, CHIP maintains the innovation layer between computational research and care delivery.
Artificial intelligence has been central to CHIP’s work for decades. Our investigators develop, use, and evaluate machine learning, natural language processing, and large language models to help clinicians interpret complex records, identify patients at risk, make point-of-care decisions, and shorten diagnostic odysseys. This work also advances public health and reveals biological patterns in molecular, genomic, and multimodal data for cancer and other diseases.
CHIP’s research and innovation draw on electronic health records, clinical text, imaging, molecular data, social media, real-world data, and population-level information to generate new knowledge and build practical systems. Our pioneering work in SMART on FHIR interfaces helped establish the technical foundation for modern health interoperability. Six federal rules and regulations stemming from the interoperability language of the 21st Century Cures Act reflect this work, advancing standardized interfaces that help individuals access their own health data while enabling clinical initiatives, AI systems, research, and public health programs to connect more effectively to electronic health record data at the population scale.
Many CHIP innovations are expressed through open source software, open standards, and open specifications. This approach has propelled them into widespread use, including as the foundation for multi-hospital research and innovation networks.
CHIP’s influence extends across industry and government. The largest information technology companies, major pharmaceutical companies, the White House, Congress, and many federal agencies have long sought guidance and input from CHIP faculty.
We prepare the next generation of leaders through interdisciplinary education at the undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral levels. CHIP graduates have gone on to leadership positions in academia and industry, including at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and major pharmaceutical companies.
