Monday, December 19, 2022

Kudos for the Informatics Professor - 2022 Update

The year 2022 was a highly productive one for the Informatics Professor, and I am pleased to provide my periodic update of my recent accomplishments. This year had another big event in my decision to step down as the one and only Chair of the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology. More will be posted about that when my successor is named. Meanwhile, here are my accomplishments for 2022.

I received two prominent awards this year. One was from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), my main professional association, for the William Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics. This award "acknowledges people who have influenced our thinking about informatics, especially improving health and health care in ways that are visionary and transformative." This year I was also elected to the second class of the ACM SIGIR Academy, which was established to "honor and recognize individuals who have made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of information retrieval (IR)." I am thrilled to be honored by the two fields of which I work at the intersection between them.

This year I completed my term as the Second President of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). I will continue for another two years as Past President.

In 2022, I was awarded several new grants, which will help sustain the research and teaching that I plan to continue as I reduce my administrative and leadership roles. Probably the most important of these was the OHSU Training Grant in Biomedical Informatics and Data Science, which was renewed for another five year cycle through 2027. This training grant from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds predoctoral (PhD) and postdoctoral trainees in the OHSU Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. This grant has been funded continuously at OHSU since 1992. This renewal marks the seventh consecutive five-year cycle of funding for OHSU. Its first 30 years make it the second-longest-running training grant at OHSU. The grant's total funding over that time of $21,912,538 make it the largest training grant ever at OHSU. I myself am a product of this training grant, completing my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 1987-1990.

Another grant from the NLM for which I am PI is an R25 grant to fund the OHSU Biomedical Informatics and Data Science College Undergraduate Summer Internship Program for five years. The grant is among 12 awards issued by the National Library of Medicine to prepare historically underrepresented students for biomedical informatics and data science graduate studies and research careers. The goal of the our program is to provide a rich, full-time experience to students to graduate study and careers in biomedical informatics and data science. In addition, the program aims to motivate students to pursue doctoral training in biomedical informatics and data science that leads to research careers in academia, government, healthcare, and industry. The funding from the R25 grant will be used to support summer experiences for students with backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in biomedical informatics and data science.

A final new grant for 2022 was from the new NIH Bridge2AI Initiative. I am among a group of faculty from OHSU and Washington University who will be serving as the Skills and Workforce Development Module for one of the four funded data-acquisition projects. The project we are part of will focus on creating data sets that aim to use voice as a biomarker of health.

I also had a good year of publications in 2022, not the least of which was the release of the 8th edition of Health Informatics: Practical Guide, in which I serve as Editor and have authored about a third of the chapters. My journal publications for 2022 included the following:

In 2022, I was also a guest on a couple of podcasts. One was to provide an introduction to an episode on of the For Your Informatics podcast on the gender pay gap among physicians, including those in informatics. The other was to be interviewed for the IAHSI podcast on Exploring Healthcare Interoperability about my work in teaching about healthcare data standards and interoperability.

I also gave a number of invited talks in 2022:

  • Biomedical and Health Informatics: Impact, Challenges, and Opportunities, Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine, University of Nevada Las Vegas (virtual), January 27, 2022 (slides and references)
  • Competencies and Curricula Across the Spectrum of Learners for Health Informatics, Keynote Talk, IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, First International Workshop on Health Informatics Education, Rochester, MN, June 11, 2022 (slides and references)
  • Translational Artificial Intelligence (AI): The Need to Translate from Basic Science to Clinical Value, University of Alabama Birmingham Informatics Institute (virtual), September 2, 2022 (slides and references and video)
  • Past, Present, and Future: A Discussion About DMICE Going Forward, OHSU Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, October 6, 2022 (slides and video)
  • Applying Information Retrieval to the Electronic Health Record for Cohort Discovery and Rare Disease Detection, Brown University Center for Biomedical Informatics, Providence, RI, October 13, 2022 (slides and references)
  • Competencies and Curricula Across the Spectrum of Learners for Biomedical and Health Informatics, International Symposium on Achievements, Milestones and Challenges in Biomedical and Health Informatics, Athens, Greece, October 29, 2002 (slides)

In 2022 I also delivered my annual lecture to first-year OHSU medical students, Information is Different Now That You're a Doctor, on September 2, 2022. I also gave this talk to first-year medical students at Nova Southeastern University (virtual) on June 16, 2022.

I additionally attended my 37th consecutive AMIA Annual Symposium, where I participated in three activities:

  • Panel: Beyond Wrangling and Modeling: Data Science and Machine Learning Competencies and Curricula for The Rest of Us
  • Job Talk Panel for the AMIA Clinical Informatics Fellows (ACIF)
  • Debate: Extension of the Practice Pathway for ABMS Clinical Informatics Board Certification for Physicians in the United States

This year I also served as Co-Chair of the Scientific Program Committee of the conference hosted by Brown University, The Patient and The Practitioner in the Age of Technology: Promoting Healing Relationships.

In 2022, I also maintained my various scientific citation rankings. In the list of Best Computer Science Scientists, I now rank 694th in the US and 1183rd in the world based on a discipline-specific H-index they calculate. I also maintain a presence in the latest iteration of a database of the top 100,000 cited scientists in the world for 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields, where I rank 22,553rd based on a composite formula of citation and publishing variables. In the medical informatics subfield, I rank 13th. Of the 290 individuals affiliated with OHSU, I rank 50th. I also maintain my presence on ranking lists based on the Google Scholar h-index for biomedical informatics and information retrieval.

Finally, this blog is mentioned in various lists of best blogs, including the following:

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