Physician Reshapes Care with Machine Learning and AI

One day a week, Nicholas L. Rider, D.O., an immunology and clinical informatics specialist, sees pediatric and adult patients at Carilion Clinic’s Allergy and Immunology clinic at Tanglewood in Roanoke. 

Other days find him at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine’s CHILI (for computational human immunology lab and innovation hub), where he leads a team of researchers using complex healthcare data to gain new insights on immune disorders.

Dr. Rider is an early example of the kind of specialist physicians Carilion Clinic and Virginia Tech are joining forces to hire. He came to Carilion in 2024 from Houston’s Texas Children’s Hospital, ​​the world’s largest children’s hospital.

At Carilion’s Tanglewood Center in Roanoke, Dr. Rider treats pediatric and adult patients with ​​primary immune disease, or PI, a rare disorder affecting about 60 of every 100,000 people. Because of PI’s rarity, a large number of cases go undiagnosed—a challenge that is only magnified in rural communities.

 At CHILI, Dr. Rider’s team is using clinical data and advanced tools to study disease biology, epidemiology, and treatment inequities -- all with a shared mission to improve outcomes for people with PI, wherever they live.

Beyond directing his team’s immunology research, through his additional role as an associate chief medical information officer at Carilion, his responsibilities include building a collaborative research infrastructure combining the power of Carilion’s vast amount of privacy-protected patient data with Virginia Tech’s world-class research capabilities.

Collaborations that combine Virginia Tech’s state-of-the-art, high-performance computing capabilities, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, with Carilion’s deep patient data, “have real potential for dramatically reshaping healthcare,” Dr. Rider said.

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