Sanja Avramovic, PhD

Sanja Avramovic is an associate professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy at George Mason University. Her research focus is on big data sets available through electronic health records; health informatics; and developing an efficient and scalable algorithm for variable selection and predictions. She is interested in examining the association of antibiotics and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) with mortality; and the risks to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among veterans. She worked on developing an index for mortality calculation based on Naïve Bayesian Networks. Also, using a Veteran Administration data set she conducted a retrospective cohort study to describe clinical characteristics and outcomes associated with Clostridium difficile infection. She analyzed data provided by National Cancer Institute, mapped codes into Unified Medical Language System identifiers and ran a machine learning method on the prepared dataset.

Research Interests

• Health Informatics
• Data Mining
• Predictive Modeling

Select Publications

• Avramovic S., Uriyo M., Alemi F.,Intensely Interactive Online Course, Journal of Health Administration Education, The Journal of Health Administration Education 2023 39(2).303-310 https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/aupha/jhae/2023/00000039/00000002/art00009 
• Avramovic S., Alemi F., Kanchi R., Lopez P., Hayes R.B., Thorpe L.E., Schwartz D.M., Cohort Profile: The US Veterans Administration Diabetes Risk (VADR) National Cohort, BMJ Open, 2020. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/12/e039489 
• Alemi F., Avramovic S., Schwartz M. Predicting 6-month mortality of patients from their medical history: Comparison of multimorbidity index to Deyo–Charlson index, Medicine, Volume 102, Number 5, 3 February 2023, pp. e32687-e32687(1) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1097/MD.0000000000032687 
• Alemi F, Avramovic S, Schwartz D.M. Electronic Health Record-Based Screening for Substance Abuse. Big data. 2018 Sep 1;6(3):214-24. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2018.0002 
• Davis PJ, Liu M, Sherman S, Nataranjan S, Alemi F, Jensen A, Aramovic S, Schwartz MD, Hayes, RB. HbA1c, Lipid profiles and Risk of Incident Type 2 Diabetes in United States Veterans. PloS one. 2018 Sep ember 13; 13(9):e0203484. 
• Avramovic S., Asadzadehzanjani, N., Mogharab Nia, R., Baldelli, E., Petricoin, E., Pierobon, M., Wojtusiak, J. The Side Out Foundation Metastatic Breast Cancer Database, an Open-access Portal for multi-omics Molecular Data and More. Reports of the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory. MLI 18-2, 2018. 
• Appaneal HJ., Caffrey AR., Beganovic M., Avramovic S., LaPlante KL. Predictors of mortality among a national cohort of Veterans with recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. Open Forum Infectious Diseases. 2018 July 18; 
• Davis PJ., Liu M., Alemi F., Jensen A., Avramovic S., Levy E., Hayes RB., Schwartz MD. Prior antibiotic exposure and risk of type 2 diabetes among Veterans. Primary care diabetes. 2018 July 18; 
• Min, H., Mobahi, H., Irvin, K., Avramovic, S., & Wojtusiak, J. Predicting activities of daily living for cancer patients using an ontology-guided machine learning methodology. Journal of biomedical semantics, 8(1), 39. 2017 
• Tuck, M. G., Alemi, F., Shortle, J. F., Avramovic, S., & Hesdorffer, C. A comprehensive index for predicting risk of anemia from patients' diagnoses. Big Data, 5(1), 42-52. 2017 

Select Awards Related to Teaching

• 2023 University-wide Teaching Excellence Award (2023) 
• Open Education Resource Award, for HAP 360: Introduction to Health Information Systems course, 2016  

Degrees

• PhD, Information Technology, George Mason University

• MS, Information Systems and Technology, University of Belgrade, Serbia

• BS, University of Belgrade, Serbia