The American College of Medical Informatics honored six leading contributors in the field of informatics at the annual symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) in San Francisco this week. The Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence went to Jan H. van Bemmel, Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of Medical Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, whose work has led to new knowledge in the areas of computer-assisted electrocardiography, computer-based patient records, pattern recognition and decision-support methodologies.
AMIA Signature Award Winners:
• Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence: Jan H. van Bemmel, Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of Medical Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Erasmus University, Rotterdam. In honor of Morris F. Collen, a pioneer in the field of medical informatics at Kaiser Permanente, this award is presented to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field. Dr. van Bemmel was Professor and Chairman of Medical Informatics at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He was head of the Department of Biosignal Processing at the Institute of Medical Physics TNO in Utrecht from 1963-1973, and Professor of Medical Informatics of the Faculty of Medicine at the Free University of Amsterdam from 1973 until he assumed his position in 1987. He is the former Chief Editor of Methods of Information in Medicine and the International Medical Informatics Association’s (IMIA) Yearbooks of Medical Informatics.
• Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics: Paul A. Harris, Ph.D., Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering, and Director of the Office of Research Informatics, Vanderbilt University
• Don Eugene Detmer Award for Health Policy Contributions in Informatics: John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network; and Co-chair of the National Health Information Technology Standards Committee.
Virginia K. Saba Award: Patricia Flatley Brennan, R.N., Ph.D., Lillian L. Moehlman Bascom Professor, School of Nursing and College of Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics: W. Ed Hammond, Ph.D., Director at the Duke Center for Health Informatics, Director of Academic Affairs for the Management Masters in Clinical Informatics Program and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University; Director, Applied Informatics Research, Duke Health Technology Solutions
• AMIA New Investigator Award: Rong Xu, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute of Computational Biology, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University
The symposium draws 2,500 attendees for an event featuring 600 papers, panels and posters. The AMIA Signature Awards program provides an opportunity for AMIA members at different stages of their career to be recognized for significant contributions to the field of informatics.
“AMIA is proud to recognize these esteemed individuals,” said AMIA Chair Blackford Middleton, M.D., M.P.H., of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We congratulate them on their exceptional accomplishments and their commitment to AMIA’s mission.”
