'The Signature Award recipients have made significant contributions to informatics, and in the process, have helped streamline the way data and information can be applied to patients,' said AMIA Chairwoman Nancy M. Lorenzi, PhD, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Vanderbilt University Medical Center. 'This group of Signature Award recipients joins an impressive cohort of pioneers in health who are leading the way to more robust biomedical research, a more responsive public health sector, advancements moving more quickly and efficiently from bench to bedside, and more incisive clinical practice-all of which are made possible through the science of informatics,' she added.
The Signature Awards and recipients are:
Recognizes an individual who has made a significant contribution over the course of a career in health policy, conducted in accordance with the philosophy that all citizens and populations deserve a state-of-the-art health system that provides safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable health care services. The recipient exemplifies visionary leadership in the health policy realm, action-oriented advocacy work producing a regional, national or global result, advancement in thought leadership, and generating a sustainable contribution to the health system.
David Bates, MD, MSc, is chief of the Division of General Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston; medical director of Clinical and Quality Analysis, IS; and a professor at both Harvard's Medical School and its School of Public Health. Dr. Bates has done extensive work evaluating the incidence and prevention of adverse drug events, and in improving efficiency and quality of diagnostic testing using information systems. He is currently evaluating the impact of guidelines on the delivery of quality of care, using electronic medical records. His work focuses on how to help clinicians make better decisions to produce more efficient, higher quality, and safer care, using information technology (see also Public Health).
Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics
Recognizes an individual for a specific technological, research, or educational contribution that advances biomedical informatics. The recipient's work will have been conducted in a nonprofit setting, and the adoption of the particular advance will be on a national or international level.
Carol Friedman, PhD, is a professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Her work has demonstrated that a general natural language processing system could be used to improve clinical care and to advance understanding of medicine. Dr. Friedman developed a comprehensive natural language extraction and encoding system for the clinical domain called MedLEE, which has been in use at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and which has been shown not only to behave similarly to medical experts but also to improve actual patient care. In collaboration, she adapted MedLEE into a natural language processing system called GENIES, which extracts biomolecular relations from journal articles to obtain data on molecular pathways. From there, she went on to co-develop the BioMedLEE system, another adaptation of MedLEE, which extracts a broad range of genotypic-phenotypic relations from the literature, and maps the extracted information to an ontology appropriate for biology. Dr. Friedman is currently working on research in the area of patient safety, using data from clinical narrative notes to detect novel adverse drug events.
Keywords: American Medical Informatics Association, Emerging Technologies, Hospital, Information Technology, Information and Data Systems, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Public Health.
This article was prepared by Biotech Week editors from staff and other reports. Copyright 2010, Biotech Week via NewsRx.com.
