Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador, interviews Dr. Rachel Ramoni, Chief Research and Development Officer at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.
Ira Pastor Comments:
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is a federal Cabinet-level agency that provides comprehensive healthcare services to military veterans at over 1,000 VA medical centers and outpatient clinics located throughout the US. It also provides several non-healthcare benefits including disability compensation, vocational rehabilitation, education assistance, home loans, and life insurance; and provides burial and memorial benefits to eligible veterans and family members.
The VA serves over 9 million enrolled Veterans each year, employs over 377,000 people and has an annual budget of $200 billion.
Within the VA structure, the Office of Research & Development is focused on improving the lives of Veterans, and all Americans, through health care discovery and innovation including: basic, translational, clinical, health services, and rehabilitative research, and applies scientific knowledge to develop effective individualized care solutions.
Dr. Rachel Ramoni
Dr. Rachel Ramoni, is the Chief Research and Development Officer of the VA, where she oversees the VA’s nationwide research enterprise, encompassing some 2,000 active projects at more than 100 sites, with a total budget of $2 billion in both direct VA support, and research funding from outside entities such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other federal agencies, and nonprofit and private organizations.
Dr. Ramoni earned a Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry degree from the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, as well as a Master of Science and Doctor of Science in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dr. Ramoni was previously on the faculty at New York University College of Dentistry in the department of epidemiology and health promotion, and at Harvard Medical School in the department of biomedical informatics.
While at Harvard, Dr. Ramoni founded and led the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) Coordinating Center, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and brings together clinical and research experts from across the U.S. to solve challenging medical mysteries using advanced technologies.
Among Dr. Ramoni’s research interests are informatics, genomics, and precision medicine.
Prior to her role with the UDN, she was Executive Director of the Substitutable Medical Applications Reusable Technologies project, or SMART. Initially launched with federal funding, SMART aims to make it easier for providers across different health systems to securely share information from electronic health records. The overarching goal is to improve the quality and continuity of care for patients.
Dr. Ramoni has also led research projects aimed at improving dental care nationwide. She worked on implementing standardized diagnostic terms for dentistry, and developing a patient safety system that would help dentists identify and prevent adverse events.
She is extensively published and her publications have appeared in Birth Defects Research, Epidemiology, Circulation, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Human Genetics, and numerous other journals.
On this episode we will hear from Dr. Ramoni about:
Her background; how she developed an interest in science, in dental medicine, in epidemiology, and a little bit of her journey to her leadership role at the VA. A general discussion about the VA, the VA Research and Development purview, and the general model surrounding how VA research is implemented, both intramural and extramural. Some of the VA research strategic priorities as it pertains research related to COVID, their precision oncology programs, and rare / mystery disorders such as Gulf War Syndrome. She shares with us details about the Million Veteran Program and it’s relation to the NIH “All-of-Us” program. We hear of important influencers / mentors during the course of Dr. Ramoni’s career.
Credits: Ira Pastor interview video, text, and audio.
Follow Ira Pastor on Twitter: @IraSamuelPastor
If you liked this interview, be sure to check out our interview with Chris Lunt, Chief Technology Officer of the All of Us Research Program run by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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