Director, Health Informatics Division; Professor, Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology
Co-Director, Biostatistics and Informatics Shared Resource

don@umn.edu
612 624-4689 — office
Preferred method of contact: e-mail

Dr. Connelly has a 30-year history of innovation and continual involvement in clinical informatics in the health care delivery and clinical research settings in an operational, investigational, and/or educational capacity. He has a long record of cooperative and collaborative working relationships with operational and research units in the delivery environment having directed a substantial hospital-based information systems group within a large and complex university hospital for twenty years. He led the former Informatics Shared Resource of the University of Minnesota Cancer Center for seven years and is co-director of the newly combined Biostatistics and Informatics Shared Resource.

Dr. Connelly serves as the Cancer Center's caBIG™ point of contact and has been a member of caBIG™'s Clinical Trials Management Systems Workspace and the Data Sharing and Intellectual Capital Workspace since their inception. He also is the principal investigator of an AHRQ-funded study focused on health information exchange between three major healthcare systems to improve clinical information transfer during healthcare transitions. He has successfully led development teams in the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation of at least three systems intended for direct use by clinicians including what may have been the first Web-based system used by clinicians in the day-to-day care of patients. He has served as a consultant to heath care systems regionally, nationally, and internationally with regards to the selection, evaluation, and planning of clinical systems.

Dr. Connelly has authored over a hundred articles, books and book chapters focused on informatics-related issues with a frequent emphasis on overcoming barriers to use of information technology. He is a member of multiple national professional organizations focused on information technology in medicine and healthcare. He has participated extensively in Minnesota's e-Health Initiative which is a developing public-private partnership with wide participation by health systems, payers, provider groups, hospital associations, state government, and state public health agencies.

Research Interests

• Laboratory tests for predicting prostate cancer aggressiveness
• Informatics tools for promoting translational and collaborative research
• Health information exchange for improving clinical outcomes

Selected Publications

Skeate RC, Wahi MM, Jessurun J, Connelly DP: Personal digital assistant-enabled report content knowledgebase results in more complete pathology reports and enhances resident learning. Hum Pathol 2007, 38:1727-1735

Kube DM, Savci-Heijink CD, Lamblin AF, Kosari F, Vasmatzis G, Cheville JC, Connelly DP, Klee GG. Optimization of laser capture microdissection and RNA amplification for gene expression profiling of prostate cancer. BMC Mol Biol 2007, 8:25

Connelly DP. Critical pathways, clinical practice guidelines, test selection, and ordering. (In) Ward-Cook K, Lehmann C, Schoeff L and Williams RH (eds) Clinical Diagnostic Technology: The total Testing Process, Vol. 1 Washington: AACC Press, 2003, pp 47-63.

Raman S, Harris IB, Connelly DP, et al. Evaluation of the implementation of an electronic medical record. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2003, 979.

Connelly DP. Connecting what clinicians want to be told with what laboratories wish to tell them. Lab Hematology 2003 9:74-5.

Connelly DP Using web technologies for implementing testing strategies. Clinic Lab Med 22:1-17. 2002