Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine

by Edward H. Shortliffe (Editor), James J. Cimino (Editor)

This series is directed to healthcare professionals who are leading the transformation of health care by using information and knowledge. Launched in 1988 as Computers in Health Care, the series offers a broad range of some addressed to specific prof- sions such as nursing, medicine, and health administration; others to special areas of practice such as trauma and radiology. Still other books in the series focus on interd- ciplinary issues, such as the computer-based patient record, electronic health records, and networked healthcare systems. Renamed Health Informatics in 1998 to reflect the rapid evolution in the discipline, the series will continue to add titles that contribute to the evolution of the field. In the series, eminent experts, serving as editors or authors, offer their accounts of inno- tions in health informatics. Increasingly, these accounts go beyond hardware and so- ware to address the role of information in influencing the transformation of healthcare delivery systems around the world. The series also will increasingly focus on “peop- ware” and organizational, behavioral, and societal changes that accompany the dif- sion of information technology in health services environments.

Kindle Edition

Published December 2, 2006

About the author

Edward ("Ted") Hance Shortliffe (born 1947) is a Canadian-born American biomedical informatician, physician, and computer scientist. Shortliffe is a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence in medicine. He was the principal developer of the clinical expert system MYCIN, one of the first rule-based artificial intelligence expert systems, which obtained clinical data interactively from a physician user and was used to diagnose and recommend treatment for severe infections. While never used in practice (because it preceded the era of local-area networking and could not be integrated with patient records and physician workflow), its performance was shown to be comparable to and sometimes more accurate than that of Stanford infectious disease faculty. This spurred the development of a wide range of activity in the development of rule-based expert systems, knowledge representation, belief nets and other areas, and its design greatly influenced the subsequent development of computing in medicine.

He is also regarded as a founder of the field of biomedical informatics, and in 2006 received one of its highest honors, the Morris F. Collen Award given by the American College of Medical Informatics.