Biography
Dr. Chris Harle is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health. He is also the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the Regenstrief Institute and a research scientist in Regenstrief’s Center for Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Harle is also an Associate Faculty in the IU Kelley School of Business where he teaches in the Physician MBA program.
From 2020 to 2022, Dr. Harle was the Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) for the University of Florida (UF) Health. In this role, he was responsible for strategy and operations of research data services across the UF Academic Health Center. He also played a lead role in the recruitment of over 25 new faculty members as part of UF Health's Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiative. From 2015-2019, Dr. Harle was an Associate Professor and PhD Program Director in the Fairbanks School's Department of Health Policy and Management.
Dr. Harle's work focuses on bringing together diverse teams from different academic disciplines, healthcare organizations, and information technology services to design, implement, and evaluate the impact of health information systems. He is passionate about developing individuals and teams that continually learn while making a difference in healthcare and public health. In 2017, his research was recognized by Indiana University Indianapolis with the Research Frontiers Trailblazer Award. in 2018, Dr. Harle was selected as a member of the Indiana Business Journal's Forty under 40 Class based on his work to improve chronic pain care and safe opioid prescribing.
Dr. Harle holds an MS in Decision and Information Sciences from the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration and a PhD in information systems and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III College. Subsequently, he completed a National Institutes of Health-funded career development award in Clinical and Translational Science.
Research Interests
Dr. Harle’s research focuses on the design, adoption, use, and value of health information systems. His primary interest is in understanding how information technology-mediated communication tools affect consumer, patient, and healthcare provider decisions and behavior. He is also interested in developing research informatics infrastructure and service processes that support clinical and translational research.
Recently, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), his research has focused on developing clinical decision support (CDS) tools to support primary care clinicians in chronic pain care and opioid prescribing. These projects have included a user-centered design studies to create novel prototypes for CDS, a pragmatic trial examining the effect of the electronic health record-based Chronic Pain OneSheet intervention, and an ongoing type III effectiveness-implementation trial to evaluate scaling CDS using interoperable technologies.
In other recent and ongoing work funded by the NIH, AHRQ, and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Dr. Harle has led and collaborated on studies examining interactive e-consent applications, text message-based vaccine recommendations, computable phenotypes for social risks, telemedicine effectiveness in primary care, patient matching algorithms, research re-use of nursing care plan data, and health administrators' information needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
