Jeffery Talbert, Ph.D.
Artificial Intelligence and Health
Augusta University
Recruited: 2025
Jeffery Talbert leads a comprehensive effort at Augusta University to leverage vast amounts of data to improve decision-making in healthcare and health policy. This requires designing and implementing a robust technology infrastructure; acquiring and integrating data; and navigating the complexities of data governance — how information can and will be used.
All of this takes place in the university's newly established Department of Artificial Intelligence and Health. As department chair and its first employee, Talbert is charting the vision, strategy and execution roadmap to build something monumental from the ground up, much as he did during his 30-year career at the University of Kentucky.
The new department harnesses AI to transform how the university conducts research, delivers patient care, trains medical professionals and improves community health. A key priority is building research capacity in data science and AI methodology to compete more effectively for NIH grants, including those in the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program, which accelerates the translation of medical discoveries into treatments.
Talbert's track record at Kentucky demonstrated his ability to build comprehensive data programs from scratch. After joining the university's Martin School of Public Policy in 1995, he began a longtime collaboration with the state's Medicaid and behavioral health agencies. The collaboration brought a data warehouse and analytics platform that informed how program costs could be better managed, including drug pricing and prescription use. The infrastructure constituted a new foundation to strengthen decision-making on Medicaid drug policies and coverage across the state. It also established Talbert's formula for success: powerful technology plus rigorous governance equals sustainable impact.
After a year away in Texas, Talbert was recruited back to Kentucky in 2007 to lead the Research Data Management Center (RDMC), an enterprise that operated data analytics systems for the state's behavioral health network, including mental health clinics and psychiatric hospitals. Talbert expanded the center into the Institute for Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy, which focused on the larger goal of using data and evidence-based policy to improve outcomes in pharmaceutical health.
He also joined the UK Center for Clinical and Translational Science in 2008 to lead development of a research data warehouse for UK HealthCare to support the university's application to the NIH CTSA program. By integrating clinical data from electronic medical records, the platform generated informatics tools and dashboards to strengthen operations in the clinic; importantly, it also bolstered scientific inquiry across the university.
Technology was half the challenge: A major part of the data warehouse effort involved establishing the processes and agreements to govern how patient data could be used for research. "Balancing researcher access with patient privacy protections required countless meetings with legal, compliance and clinical teams," Talbert recalls. Working with the health system's chief information officer, he established and chaired a research data governance committee to streamline access to data while protecting data privacy and security. This led to the creation of a new enterprise data center to serve as a validated, secure facility for campus research using protected data.
Talbert's infrastructure work proved instrumental in the NIH’s decision to award UK its first CTSA grant in 2011. The multi-year award of $17.5 million was a seminal moment for research and healthcare at the university. By having its own research data warehouse, UK could tap into the network of research data at other CTSAs across the nation, expanding access to vast amounts of data and integrating the university into a network of clinical trial locations. The CTSA infrastructure Talbert built transformed Kentucky's research capacity: In the ensuing years, the research data warehouse would support hundreds of investigator requests annually. In addition, research subjects could now be recruited directly for clinical trials, and UK would join several national research consortia.
In 2020, Talbert moved to UK’s College of Medicine to serve as chief of biomedical informatics and lead the Institute for Biomedical Informatics (IBI), a campus-wide resource to provide investigators with data and tools to support large data projects. The transition marked Talbert's pivot from traditional data warehousing to AI and machine learning — tools that generate invaluable insights and predictions from data. IBI launched an innovation core in 2021 to focus on emerging technologies, leading to the formation of what would soon become the Center for Applied AI. An NSF grant allowed the center to build infrastructure and recruit technical teams to develop and deploy AI tools, so that investigators could use machine learning and large language models in their research.
Beyond building infrastructure, Talbert has pursued his own research agenda at the intersection of data and policy. He’s used AI and big data informatics to prevent and treat substance use disorders, and his research has ranged from massive multi-state initiatives to focused local studies. Among the largest endeavors was co-leading the data and informatics core for the Kentucky HEALing Communities Study, an $87 million NIH-funded initiative to determine the most effective mix of evidence-based approaches that would reduce deaths from opioid overdose. Kentucky was one of four states to receive funding for such an effort, part of which involved months of negotiating data use agreements to monitor outcomes from opioid use disorder at the county level.
The HEALing initiative also led to a new ongoing NIH study. RADOR-KY (Rapid Actionable Data for Opioid Response) ingests data from over 100 sources and implements advanced AI algorithms to monitor opioid-related outcomes and generate predictive models for when and where opioid deaths are likely to occur in Kentucky communities. The project integrates highly detailed information from all 120 Kentucky counties, displaying it through public community dashboards to help key stakeholders pinpoint gaps in treatment and policy.
At UK, Talbert also served as an investigator on a range of other studies, from determining the impact of high-deductible insurance plans on people in rural areas to mapping suicide risk in adults and their access to mental health treatments. By 2025, his body of work was formidable, with more than 100 funded research projects (totaling over $130 million), 260 publications and perhaps most importantly, a proven blueprint for building data infrastructure that transforms healthcare. That track record made him the ideal candidate to build Augusta University's Department of AI and Health from the ground up.
Beyond empowering research, the new AU department will train a new generation of health data scientists and AI specialists to lead healthcare innovation in an era when AI is reshaping medicine. Key to both teaching and research is the university's partnership with Wellstar Health System through the Wellstar MCG Health Medical Center. The partnership gives researchers access to one of the most comprehensive health data ecosystems in the Southeast. And the department plans to work with Wellstar to create AI-ready datasets to support analysis of multimodal imaging and shape next-generation AI applications for healthcare.
Research
- Clinical informatics focused on optimizing healthcare delivery and patient safety through advanced health information systems — leveraging AI, deep learning and large language models to extract predictive insights from EMRs; automate clinical documentation; and support real-time decision-making at the point of care
- Public health informatics that applies computational methods to population health challenges, using deep learning for disease forecasting; LLMs for real-time outbreak detection through social media analysis; and machine learning to integrate diverse data sources (including surveillance systems, environmental sensors and social determinants of health)
- Quantitative support for evidence-based public health policy by modeling intervention scenarios, optimizing resource allocation, establishing causal relationships in population-level interventions and identifying health inequities that require targeted policy action to improve community health outcomes
Choosing Georgia
“The Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University presented a rare opportunity to create something transformative from scratch. The university and medical center have a talented group of professionals ready and willing to open new frontiers in using big data, artificial intelligence and technology to improve patient outcomes and policy. The partnership with Wellstar brings a vast collection of data ready to be the foundation of these advances, and the State of Georgia has demonstrated its willingness to invest in making them happen.”
