In 2006, 13 new fellows were elected to the American College of Medical Informatics, and were inducted into the College at a ceremony held in conjunction with the American Medical Informatics Association conference in Washington, DC, on November 12, 2006. A brief synopsis of the background and accomplishments of each of the new fellows is provided here, in alphabetical order.
Michael Becich, MD, PhD
Dr. Becich received his bachelor’s, MD, and PhD degrees from Northwestern University, and undertook residency and fellowship training in anatomic pathology at Washington University in St. Louis. He advanced through the academic ranks at the University of Pittsburgh, and is now Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, Director of Oncology and Pathology Informatics, and also Professor of Information Sciences and Telecommunications. In this capacity, he has had an important role in the National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (CaBIG) and particularly the CaTissue application for research tissue banking.
In addition to his scholarly contributions, Mike Becich is best known for creating the Advancing Practice, Instruction, and Innovation (APIII) conference and the Association for Pathology Informatics (API). His nomination to the College notes that “Frustrated with the slow pace of adoption of informatics ideas in mainstream pathology, Mike took the bull by the horns and established these wildly successful subspecialty activities” and that “he is a deep thinker about the future of collaborative informatics and its role in personalized medicine.” Dr. Becich’s election to the College recognizes these diverse and sustained contributions to the field.
Carolyn Clancy, MD
Dr. Clancy received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and chemistry from Boston College and her MD degree from the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine. She undertook postgraduate training in internal medicine, and was a Kaiser Foundation fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a faculty member in the Department of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1983 through 1990, and her first informatics research project at that institution demonstrated the impact of adding a reminder to a computerized provider order entry system related to use of pneumococcal vaccine in high-risk patients. In 1990 she joined the staff of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and rose to become director of AHRQ’s Center for Primary Care Research, and Center for Outcomes and Effectiveness Research. Her success in these endeavors led to her appointment as director of the agency in 2003. As noted in her nomination, her stewardship of AHRQ continues to advance not only quality and patient safety, but also the realization of the value of health informatics. She brings to the College substantial experience at the intersection of quality, safety, and informatics.
David Classen, MD
Dr. Classen received his bachelor’s and MD degrees from the University of Virginia, undertook postgraduate training in internal medicine at the University of Connecticut, and an infectious diseases fellowship at the University of Utah. He then obtained a master’s degree in medical informatics, also from the University of Utah. As an assistant and currently associate professor of medicine, he undertook a series of studies of adverse drug effects and medication safety, and helped develop computerized decision support tools for antibiotic selection that have had sustained impacts on improving outcomes and shortening inpatient length of stay. These studies have been widely cited in the national dialog regarding reduction of medical errors. In 1997 he was named Intermountain Health Care’s Researcher of the Year, and in 2000 he joined First Consulting Group and there leads their safety and health care quality initiatives and consulting practice. His contributions to building programs that measure and improve the quality and safety of health care are recognized by his election to fellowship in the College.
Janet Corrigan, MBA, PhD
Dr. Corrigan received her bachelor’s degree in social services from Syracuse, an MBA from the University of Rochester, and a master’s degree in industrial and operations engineering and a PhD in health services organization and policy from the University of Michigan. She served with the Physician Payment Review Commission in Washington, the Group Health Association of America, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, where she helped create the widely implemented Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set performance measures. She was a principal researcher at the Center for the Study of Health System Change, executive director of the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry, and Senior Board Director for the Institute of Medicine Board on Health Care Services, which produced the “To Err is Human” and “Crossing the Quality Chasm” reports. She is now President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Quality Forum, and her election to the College recognizes these influential activities and contributions.
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Michael Becich
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Carolyn Clancy
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David Classen
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Janet Corrigan
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Robert Dolin
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Steven Downs
Robert Dolin, MD
Dr. Dolin received his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of California at San Diego, received his MD degree from University of California at Irvine, and did his postgraduate training in internal medicine at University of California at Los Angeles. His primary interests have revolved around “semantic interoperability” and the development of richly expressive models of health care that can be used to trigger advanced decision support functionality. He is a member of Kaiser Permanente’s Convergent Medical Terminology Team and has been a sustained contributor to knowledge representation standards in health care, and is on the Health Level 7 (HL7) Board of Directors and the Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine International Standards Board. He is one of the chief architects of the evolving Health Level 7 Clinical Document Architecture. His election to the College recognizes these important and creative efforts in knowledge representation and communication standards development for biomedical data.
Steven Downs, MD, MS
Dr. Downs received is bachelor’s degree in cellular biology and chemistry from the University of Colorado, and his MD from Stanford. He was also the first student to complete the Stanford Medical Informatics training program and received a master’s degree in medical information science from Stanford in 1986, which he later supplemented with postgraduate training in pediatrics at the University of North Carolina. He was a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in clinical epidemiology at Chapel Hill, and began his faculty career there as a assistant and then associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering. From 1997 to 2002 he was the principal investigator of the Duke–University of North Carolina biomedical informatics training grant. In 2001 he moved to Indiana University, where he is associate professor and chief of general pediatrics at Wishard and Clarian hospitals, and founding director of the Children’s Health Services Research Section in the School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics.
His informatics research interests have ranged over many topics. These include using the expected value of information for a variety of purposes, such as the scoring of student performance on computer simulations (which has been adopted by the American Board of Family Practice as an examination scoring method for recertification) and use of expected value of information as a basis for prioritizing physician reminders. His election to the College recognizes these sustained contributions to informatics research and education.
Peter Elkin, MD
Dr. Elkin received his bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Union College, his MD from New York Medical College, and was a National Library of Medicine (NLM) Research Fellow in medical informatics at the Laboratory of Computer Science at Mass. General Hospital. There he acquired a research interest in health data representation and controlled vocabularies. In 1996 he moved to Mayo Clinic and has risen through the ranks there to become Professor of Medicine. He is the primary author of the American National Standards Institute standard on Quality Indicators for Controlled Health Vocabularies, and has been an active contributor to HL7, the American Society for Testing and Materials E31 Bioinformatics standards group, the American Medical Informatics Association’s education committee, the G-7 Enable Project, and the International Standards Organization TC215 Health Data Advisory Group. He was principal investigator for a recently completed NLM R01 research grant to determine the “utility of automated systems for large scale mapping of concepts to controlled terminologies, with the aim of establishing methods for more complete, accurate and uniform descriptions of encounters between clinicians and patients.” His election to the College recognizes these research and international standards development activities.
Figure 7.
Peter Elkin
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Arie Hasman
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John Holmes
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Robert Kolodner
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Mark Leavitt
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Harold Lehmann
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Wayne Peay
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Latanya Sweeney
Arie Hasman, PhD
In 1995 the College created the new category of International Associates to honor the achievements of medical informaticians outside of North America who have had an important impact on medical informatics in this country, and throughout the world. In 2006 Arie Hasman, PhD, was a newly elected international associate. Dr. Hasman is Professor of Medical Informatics and Director of the Department of Informatics at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He has been a longtime contributor to the International Medical Informatics Association and the European Federation of Medical Informatics, and has an international reputation for his research in signal and image processing, clinical decision support, and medical informatics education.
John Holmes, PhD
Dr. Holmes received his bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in information systems design and doctorate in information science from Drexel University. Beginning in 1982, he rose through the ranks of research staff of the Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit at the University of Pennsylvania, and on the occasion of election to the College has a primary appointment in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine as Assistant Professor of Medical Informatics. Over the past two and a half decades Dr. Holmes has developed and taught courses in informatics and database management for clinical research and epidemiology. His research interests are in the areas of evolutionary computation and machine learning approaches to knowledge discovery in databases, information systems infrastructures for epidemiologic surveillance, clinical decision support systems, semantic analysis, and information systems user behavior. He has done innovative work in the use of game-based approaches to reducing delays in seeking care for suspected coronary syndrome and a game-based intervention for 4th to 6th graders to teach children about appropriate antibiotic use.
He has led development of several computerized interventions for reducing health disparities in minority populations, and established a national-scale surveillance system for capturing data on children involved in motor vehicle crashes. Recently he has been applying methods from population-based surveillance to proteomic and genomic data for molecular and genetic epidemiology and the genetics of complex traits. His election to the College recognizes his sustained contributions to informatics research and education.
Robert Kolodner, MD
Dr. Robert Kolodner received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard and his MD degree from Yale. After a medical internship at New England Deaconess Hospital he was a Clinical Fellow in Medicine at Harvard, and then completed his psychiatric residency at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. He rose through the ranks of the VA informatics hierarchy, serving as Director of Medical Information Resources Management and Associate Chief Information Officer, and at the time he was nominated to the American College of Medical Informatics fellowship he was Chief Health Informatics Officer for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Washington, DC.
Over the course of his career, Dr. Kolodner has profoundly influenced the field of clinical information systems contributions to the VA Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (DHCP) and the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA). As noted in his nomination, the VA is widely recognized as one of the leaders in systems approaches to health care delivery due in significant part to Dr. Kolodner’s vision, thought leadership, and day-to-day guidance. Shortly after the College election, the President George W. Bush named Dr. Kolodner as Acting Director of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, succeeding Dr. David Brailer. Dr. Kolodner’s election to the College recognizes these sustained contributions that have had a national impact.
Mark Leavitt, MD
Dr. Leavitt received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona, master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford, and an MD degree from the University of Miami School of Medicine. He undertook postgraduate training in internal medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. While practicing as an internal medicine physician he founded MedicaLogic, and served as its CEO and chairman until the company was acquired by GE Healthcare Information Technologies. He has been active in American Medical Informatics Association and Healthcare Information and Managements Systems Society professional societies, and served as advisor to the Markle Foundation “Connecting for Health” program and iHealth Initiative. He has a faculty appointment in the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Leavitt’s vision for clinical systems led to MedicaLogic’s groundbreaking electronic medical records applications, and his vision and accomplishments have been recognized by his appointment as the founding Chair of the President’s Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology. His election to the College recognizes these sustained and influential contributions.
Harold Lehmann, MD, PhD
Dr. Lehmann received his bachelor’s and MD degrees from Columbia. After postgraduate training in pediatrics in New York and at Johns Hopkins, he received his PhD in medical information sciences from Stanford. He is currently Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Health Sciences Informatics, and Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins, and Director of Research and Training in Hopkins’ Division of Health Science Informatics. Dr. Lehmann has published influential studies on Bayesian communication, which is the use of the Bayesian paradigm and Bayesian statistics to the interpretation and application of research data to local decision making, and also the application of Bayesian reasoning and decision analysis to systematic reviews of the literature, and application of decision analysis to pediatric clinical problems. As principal investigator of the NLM medical informatics training grant at Johns Hopkins, he has been a proponent of new curricula and informatics education for all medical students, not only those seeking graduate degrees in our field. He has chaired American Medical Informatics Association’s Education Working Group and been a member of the American Association of Medical Colleges medical school objectives project. His election to the College recognizes his innovative research and sustained contributions to the education of health professionals.
Wayne Peay, MLS
Wayne Peay received his bachelor’s in history from the University of Utah and master’s of library science from Columbia, while serving as Assistant Director of the Data Processing Department of the Medical Library Center of New York. He returned to the University of Utah, was appointed to a series of positions of increasing responsibility at the Eccles Health Sciences Library, and has been the library director there since 1984. Since 2001 he has also been the Director of the Midcontinental Regional Medical Library of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine. As noted in his nomination to the College, Wayne Peay has been a prime mover in virtually every initiative to use computers and networking technology to support education and improve information services in the state of Utah—conceiving the projects, obtaining the grant funds, overseeing implementation, and managing the inevitable stresses among participating organizations with very different missions and priorities. He has effectively deployed successive generations of new technologies, almost always on the leading edge of adoption and with a number of notable successes that predated broad Internet access and the development of the Internet.
These efforts have improved access to high-quality health information in academic centers, community hospitals, public libraries, and other tribal and local organizations serving diverse populations. He has implemented the technical and interorganizational connections that are essential to delivering the promise of medical informatics. These efforts have been recognized by his election as a fellow of the Medical Library Association, inclusion on the National Honor Roll of the American Library Association, and now by election to the American College of Medical Informatics.
Latanya Sweeney, PHD
Dr. Sweeney received her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard, and master’s and PhD degrees in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a graduate student she won awards at the American Medical Informatics Association in 1996 and 1997 for her work on text de-identification, and was influential in crafting the data de-identification provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Privacy Rule. She is the founding director of the Laboratory for International Data Privacy at Carnegie Mellon, where she is an associate professor of computer science, technology, and policy. She has developed numerous algorithms for data de-identification and re-identification.
In addition to her scholarly publications, Dr. Sweeney’s ground-breaking research in data privacy has been featured in Consumer Reports, Newsweek, Newsday, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as on the television news magazine 20/20. Her vision and analytic approach to this emerging field have created a well-deserved international reputation, and serve as the basis for her election to the College.