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Sam Cykert, MD – Program Director (Emeritus)

Samuel Cykert, MD

Samuel Cykert, MD, Professor
UNC-Chapel Hill
5034 Old Clinic Building, CB #7110
919-966-2461
samuel_cykert@med.unc.edu

Awards and Honors

  • 1980 Honors Program for Academic Medicine, Indiana University
  • 1981 Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society, Indiana University 1993, 1994, 1996, 2002-2004,
  • 2006 Joseph P. Stevens Teaching Award, Internal Medicine Training Program
  • 1996 Outstanding AHEC Faculty Award, UNC-CH
  • 1996 Society of General Medicine National Award for Innovation in Medical Education
  • 2006 Alpha Omega Alpha Visiting Professorship, UNC-CH Gamma Chapter

View Publications » | View UNC profile »

Sam Cykert can spend hours crunching data. But no matter how deep into the numbers he gets, he never loses sight of the people that make health informatics worthwhile. In his 17 years as a health services researcher, Cykert has led dozens of studies investigating issues related to access to care, resolution of health disparities, and primary care practice improvement.

In 2010, Cykert published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that practitioners often treat lung cancer less aggressively in black patients than in whites. To address the issue, he created a system to track which patients were going to surgery and which were not, making data available by race and ethnicity. The system also carried built-in warning signals that would pop up when patients didn’t reach certain milestones in their care so the providers could look carefully at what barriers might be in the way.

“I … appreciate that informatics can fix many of the problems
I face in my work as a clinician and a researcher”

“Even though I was not trained as a health IT person, I have come to appreciate that informatics can fix many of the problems I face in my work as a clinician and a researcher,” says Cykert. “To make the changes necessary to improve population health, we have to find efficient ways of getting data together and recognizing patterns in health care.”

With reams of paper-based health records, such patterns would be virtually indecipherable. Through his work as clinical director of the North Carolina Regional Extension Center for Health Information Technology (REC), Cykert has helped nearly 4,000 providers bring electronic health records into 1,100 practices across North Carolina. Cykert says these EHRs will enable physicians to catch patients before they fall through the cracks and make sure they get the care they need.

“One important thing about health IT and EHRs is the electronic health records do nothing. It is how people interact with them that can revolutionize medicine,” says Cykert. “If women need mammograms and the doctor reminds every woman that comes to the office to schedule a mammogram, what about the 30 percent of women who haven’t come to the office that year? The EHR can generate a list of all women age 50 and above who haven’t had a mammogram, and can make similar lists of cardiac patients who haven’t taken beta blockers or diabetics whose blood sugar is out of control. In my experience, crunching that data is the most effective way to identify vulnerable patients and optimize their care.”

“crunching … data is the most effective way to
identify vulnerable patients and optimize their care”

Cykert believes UNC has the expertise and tools to take that number crunching to a whole new level. UNC researchers are actively engaged in a number of Health IT projects, ranging from the analysis of complex genetic and genomic information, to the development of machine learning techniques to process “big” data in health care, to the incorporation of text-messaging and activity-tracking devices for behavioral change.

Among UNC’s many resources is the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H), a data federation of electronic medical records and administrative claims data for more than two million patients served by UNC Health Care. Hundreds of investigators have pursued clinical and translational research studies using data CDW-H, which grows by over one million new atomic data elements every day.

UNC is also home to the Carolina Health Informatics Program (CHIP), which grants certificates and — starting this fall — master’s degrees in clinical informatics. Recently, CHIP has grown to include the Program on Health and Clinical Informatics, an initiative driven by the UNC School of Medicine and the NC Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute. As director of this new program, Cykert has met bimonthly with a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the schools of pharmacy, public health, information and library science, and medicine to develop a PhD program in clinical informatics, with a special emphasis on macroinformatics. Eventually, Cykert hopes develop a clinical informatics fellowship program to create a cadre of MDs who understand how informatics and data can be used in different health care environments on the research side.

“As an institution, we have already demonstrated our great capabilities in the area of microinformatics — computing related to genomes and tiny molecules,” says Cykert. “Now we want to strengthen our work in macroinformatics — using clinical informatics and EHRs to improve overall health.”

“we have to find a way to engage people in their health
in a long-lasting and meaningful way”

Cykert believes the biggest challenge lies in figuring out how to encourage citizens to become more actively engaged in their own health care, either by creating incentives for logging in to patient portals or devising new apps and wearable devices to help them monitor their health conditions and manage them better through exercise , eating habits, or medications.

“It is going to take a new way of looking at how we use informatics out in the world,” says Cykert. “People spend only two percent of their lives in a medical practice, so how can we get them to take good care of themselves the other 98 percent of time? How can we reach out to underserved areas, where doctor’s visits are even fewer and further between? As we navigate this new world of technology and big data, we have to find a way to engage people in their health in a long-lasting and meaningful way.”

By Marla Vacek Broadfoot

Location

160 N. Medical Drive
Brinkhous-Bullitt, 2nd Floor
University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
CB# 7064
919.966.6022 or
866.705.4931

Mon – Fri: 8AM – 5PM