Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S.
Indiana University Department of Family Medicine

Dr. Shaun Grannis is a Medical Informatics Researcher at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine, where his research interests include developing, implementing and studying technology to overcome the challenges of integrating data from distributed systems for use in health care delivery and research. Dr. Grannis developed a patient record linkage algorithm using cryptographically deidentified demographic data for use in distributed clinical data networks. The goal of the linkage algorithm is to maintain patient confidentiality while providing researchers with access to clinically meaningful data. He further extended and characterized this linkage methodology using robust probabilistic techniques.

Recently Dr. Grannis’s work focused on studying the performance of approximate string comparators for use in fully identified probabilistic patient linkage. Dr. Grannis’ recent work entitled, "Analysis of Identifier Performance using a Deterministic Linkage Algorithm", presented at the American Medical Informatics Association's 2002 Annual Symposium received the Martin Epstein Award, an infrequently awarded prize for outstanding contribution to the body of medical informatics knowledge.

Dr. Grannis is also actively involved in bio-terrorism detection and syndromic surveillance. He helped craft guidelines for biosurveillance implementation and participated in research examining the value of over-the-counter drug sales for use in disease outbreak detection. He is currently involved in multi-year studies that explore multiple facets of disease detection and syndromic surveillance challenges, including geographical deidentification, understanding temporal-spatial disease trends, and establishing syndromic surveillance data standards. He is technical lead in a 4-year project integrating data flows from over 110 hospitals in the state of Indiana for use in disease surveillance and clinical research. Dr. Grannis also maintains a clinical practice and is faculty in the department of Family Medicine at Indiana University.

After receiving his Aerospace engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Grannis spent two years in South America as an oil field analyst. He received his medical degree from Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine in 1997, and subsequently completed a residency in Family Medicine. Prior to his Research Scientist position at Indiana University and the Regenstrief Institute, Dr. Grannis was a National Library of Medicine fellow in Medical Informatics during which he also completed a masters in Health Services Research with a concentration in Medical Informatics. He currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife and their three children.