Associate Professor of Medical Science, Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice

Overview

Dr. Fraser trained in General Medicine, Cardiology and Knowledge Based Systems at Edinburgh University, in Scotland, and in Clinical Decision Making at MIT and the New England Medical Center. His work has led to the migration of medical informatics tools and expertise from high income countries to some of the most challenging environments in low income countries.  As Director of Informatics at the leading Healthcare NGO Partners In Health,  he co-founded OpenMRS an open source Electronic Health Record project. He was also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2006 - 2015. He has co-created and taught courses in Global eHealth at Leeds University, Edinburgh University and MIT, and co-authored a text book on this field. His main academic focus is in the evaluation of medical information systems particularly in Low and Middle Income Countries, and understanding the impact of information and communications on quality of healthcare world wide. He also focusses on improvement of care for non-communicable diseases particularly Heart Disease.

Dr Fraser was  the Co PI and Informatics and evaluation lead for a grant from the US CDC to evaluate the functioning, clinical impact and costs of an OpenMRS based EMR system for HIV care in Rwanda. He has previously held grants as PI from the CDC, the Rockefeller Foundation and IDRC for eHealth work in Rwanda. From 2015-2017 he held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union Horizon 2020 program.  

In 2021 He received an R01 grant as Co-PI with Professor Hogan at the Brown University School of Public Health and Ann Mwangi at Moi University in Kenya, entitled "Data Science for Decision Support in the HIV Care Cascade". This project will build prediction models using machine learning techniques and deploy them using the OpenMRS EHR with the goal to improve HIV care in Westen Kenya. We will study the use of the new system in a cluster randomized, controlled trial. 

Dr Fraser's recent work at Brown includes leading an evaluation study with Dr Megan Ranney of a diagnostic app or "Symptom Checker" from Ada health being use by patients in the ED at Rhode Island hospital.  He is also completing a study with Dr Ross Hilliard and colleagues in the evaluation of the Ada app with 200 patients in a setting seeking urgent primary care. This work is being extended to focus on the out of hospital diagnosis of stroke using two large data sets of possible stroke patients. This work is funded by an OVPR Seed grant from Brown University. 

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas