Edward H. Shortliffe

Last updated
Edward Hance Shortliffe
Born1947
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Other namesTed
Education Harvard University
Stanford University
Known for MYCIN, Biomedical informatics
Website www.shortliffe.net

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. [1] 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.

Contents

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. [2]

He has held administrative positions in academic medicine, research and national bodies including the Institute of Medicine, American College of Physicians, the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and National Library of Medicine (NLM), and been influential in the development of medicine, computing and biomedical informatics nationally and internationally. His interests include the broad range of issues related to integrated medical decision-support systems and their implementation, biomedical informatics and medical education and training, and the Internet in medicine.

In March 2007, he became founding dean of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine - Phoenix campus. He stepped down from this position in May 2008 and in January 2009 transferred his primary academic appointment to Arizona State University where he became professor of biomedical informatics. He maintained a secondary appointment as professor of basic medical sciences and of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (Phoenix Campus). In November 2009 he transferred his academic home to a part-time appointment as professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, where he lived until November 2011. Since that time he has returned to New York City, where he continues as an adjunct professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University.

In July 2009, Shortliffe assumed a position as president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Informatics Association, an organization that he helped to form between 1988 and 1990 when he was President of the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care. [3] In late 2011 he announced his intention to step down from this position in 2012.

Biography and career

Shortliffe grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, until his family moved to Connecticut when he was 6. He attended the Loomis School in Connecticut (now Loomis Chaffee School) and later Gresham's School in the United Kingdom. His father was a physician and hospital administrator; his mother, an English teacher. He has one brother and one sister.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, he started working in the computer laboratory of G. Octo Barnett at Massachusetts General Hospital and realized that he could have a career spanning both medicine and computing.

After receiving an AB in applied mathematics magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1970, he received an M.D. (1976) and Ph.D. in Medical Information Systems (1975) from Stanford University, with a dissertation on the MYCIN system, for which he also won the 1976 Grace Murray Hopper Award for outstanding computer scientists under the age of 30. He completed internal medicine house-staff training from 1976-1979 at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford Hospital. In 1979 he joined the Stanford faculty in internal medicine and computer science, where he directed the Stanford University Medical EXpertimental computer resource (SUMEX) and subsequently the Center for Advanced Medical Informatics at Stanford (CAMIS), continuing his work on expert systems, including ONCOCIN (an oncology decision support program), T-HELPER, and other projects in the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. [4] He also simultaneously served as chief of general internal medicine and associate chair of medicine for primary care, and was principal investigator of the InterMed Collaboratory, which developed the science of computable guidelines for medical decision support.

In 1980 he founded one of the earliest formal degree programs in biomedical informatics at Stanford University, emphasizing a rigorous and experimentalist approach. From 2003-2007 he served on the Board of Directors of Medco Health Solutions, a large pharmacy benefits manager headquartered in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.

In 2000 he moved to Columbia University as chair of the department of biomedical informatics, deputy vice president (Columbia University Medical Center), senior associate dean for strategic information resources (College of Physicians and Surgeons), professor of medicine, professor of computer science, and director of medical informatics services for the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He continued work on decision support guidelines including the development of the Guideline Interchange Format (GLIF3). [5]

From March 2007 until May 2008 he served as the founding dean of the Phoenix campus of the University of Arizona's College of Medicine and from November 2009 to October 2011 he served as professor in the School of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston, Texas. He has served as president and chief executive officer of the American Medical Informatics Association from 2009-2012 and continues to hold adjunct faculty appointments in biomedical informatics at Columbia University [6] and Arizona State University.

Advisory activities

At age 39, Shortliffe was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences (where he has served on the IOM executive council). He is also an elected member or fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the American Clinical and Climatological Association.

He is a founding member of the American Medical Informatics Association and was one of five founding fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics. He is a master of the American College of Physicians and was a member of that organization's Board of Regents from 1996-2002. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and serves on the editorial boards for several other biomedical informatics publications.

He has served on the oversight committee for the Division of Engineering and Physical Sciences (National Academy of Sciences) and the Biomedical Informatics Expert Panel (National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health). He also served on the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) and on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee. Earlier he served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (National Research Council), the Biomedical Library Review Committee (National Library of Medicine), and was recipient of a research career development award from the latter agency.

In 2015, he chaired a campaign to raise funds for a new AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award, highlighting the best doctoral theses in the field of biomedical informatics. [7] The first dissertation awards were made in 2017.

He is the author of more than 300 publications including seven books.

Honors

Books and Representative Papers

  1. Shortliffe, E.H. Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN, Elsevier/North Holland, New York, 1976. (Japanese-language version by Bunkodo Blue Books, Tokyo, 1981, translated by T. Kaminuma)
  2. Buchanan, B.G. and Shortliffe, E.H. (eds). Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984. See http://aaai.org/AITopics/RuleBasedExpertSystems.
  3. Clancey, W.J. and Shortliffe, E.H. (eds). Readings in Medical Artificial Intelligence: The First Decade. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984. See http://aaai.org/AITopics/ReadingsInMedicalArtificialIntelligence.
  4. Shortliffe, E.H., Wulfman, C.E., Rindfleisch, T.C., and Carlson, R.W. An Integrated Oncology Workstation. Bethesda, MD: National Cancer Institute, 1991. [Received the 1991-92 Award of Excellence from The Society for Technical Communication.]
  5. Shortliffe, E.H. (ed) and Cimino, J.J. (assoc. ed.). Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2006. (3rd edition; 2nd edition in 2000; 1st edition in 1990 (Addison Wesley)). [9]
  6. Boxwala AA, Peleg M, Tu S, Ogunyemi O, Zeng QT, Wang D, Patel VL, Greenes RA, Shortliffe EH. `GLIF3: a representation format for sharable computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines.' Journal of Biomedical Informatics 2004;37(3):147-161.
  7. Shortliffe, E.H. and Buchanan, B.G. A model of inexact reasoning in medicine. Math. Biosci. 1975;23:351-379.
  8. Duda, R.O. and Shortliffe, E.H. Expert systems research. Science, 1983;220:261-268.
  9. Greenes, R.A. and Shortliffe, E.H. Medical informatics: an emerging academic discipline and institutional priority. JAMA 1990;263:1114-1120. See http://jama.jamanetwork.com/pdfaccess.ashx?ResourceID=517040&PDFSource=13
  10. Detmer, W.M. and Shortliffe, E.H. Using the Internet to improve knowledge diffusion in medicine. Commun ACM, 1997;40(8):101-108.
  11. Shortliffe EH. Strategic Action in Health Information Technology: Why the Obvious Has Taken So Long. Health Affairs 2005;24:1222-1233.
  12. Shortliffe EH. Biomedical informatics in the education of physicians. J Am Med Assoc 2010:304(11):1227-1228.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health informatics</span> Applications of information processing concepts and machinery in medicine

Health informatics is the field of science and engineering that aims at developing methods and technologies for the acquisition, processing, and study of patient data, which can come from different sources and modalities, such as electronic health records, diagnostic test results, medical scans. The health domain provides an extremely wide variety of problems that can be tackled using computational techniques.

MYCIN was an early backward chaining expert system that used artificial intelligence to identify bacteria causing severe infections, such as bacteremia and meningitis, and to recommend antibiotics, with the dosage adjusted for patient's body weight — the name derived from the antibiotics themselves, as many antibiotics have the suffix "-mycin". The Mycin system was also used for the diagnosis of blood clotting diseases. MYCIN was developed over five or six years in the early 1970s at Stanford University. It was written in Lisp as the doctoral dissertation of Edward Shortliffe under the direction of Bruce G. Buchanan, Stanley N. Cohen and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renato M. E. Sabbatini</span> Brazilian scientist (born 1947)

Renato Marcos Endrizzi Sabbatini is a retired professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and at the State University of Campinas Institute of Biology. He received a B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences from Medical School of the University of São Paulo and a doctorate in behavioral neuroscience in 1977, followed by postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry's Primate Behavior Department. He founded the Center for Biomedical Informatics, and helped create the Brazilian Society for Health Informatics.

A guideline execution engine is a computer program which can interpret a clinical guideline represented in a computerized format and perform actions towards the user of an electronic medical record.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Rector</span> British computer scientist

Alan L. Rector is a Professor of Medical Informatics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester in the UK.

Vimla Lodhia Patel is a Fijian-born Canadian cognitive psychologist and biomedical informaticist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russ Altman</span>

Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Homer R. Warner</span> American cardiologist

Homer Richards Warner was an American cardiologist who was an early proponent of medical informatics who pioneered many aspects of computer applications to medicine. Author of the book, Computer-Assisted Medical Decision-Making, published in 1979, he served as CIO for the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, as president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was actively involved with the National Institutes of Health. He was first chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, the first American medical program to formally offer a degree in medical informatics.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), is an American non-profit organization dedicated to the development and application of biomedical and health informatics in the support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care administration.

Don E. Detmer is professor emeritus and professor of medical education at the University of Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yves A. Lussier</span>

Yves A. Lussier is a physician-scientist conducting research in Precision medicine, Translational bioinformatics and Personal Genomics. As a co-founder of Purkinje, he pioneered the commercial use of controlled medical vocabulary organized as directed semantic networks in electronic medical records, as well as Pen computing for clinicians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Utah School of Medicine</span> Medical school of the University of Utah

The University of Utah School of Medicine is located on the upper campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was founded in 1905 and is currently the only MD-granting medical school in the state of Utah.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher G. Chute</span>

Christopher G. Chute is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, physician-scientist and biomedical informatician known for biomedical terminologies and health information technology (IT) standards. He chairs the World Health Organization Revision Steering Group for the revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald A. B. Lindberg</span> Director of the US National Library of Medicine

Donald Allen Bror Lindberg was the Director of the United States National Library of Medicine from 1984 until his retirement in 2015. He was known for his work in medical computing, especially the development of PubMed. He won the 1997 Morris F. Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David W. Bates</span>

David Bates is an American-born physician, biomedical informatician, and professor, who is internationally renowned for his work regarding the use of health information technology (HIT) to improve the safety and quality of healthcare, in particular by using clinical decision support. Bates has done work in the area of medication safety. He began by describing the epidemiology of harm caused by medications, first in hospitalized patients and then in other settings such as the home and nursing homes. Subsequently, he demonstrated that by implementing computerized physician order entry (CPOE), medication safety could be dramatically improved in hospitals. This work led the Leapfrog Group to call CPOE one of the four changes that would most improve the safety of U.S. healthcare. It also helped hospitals to justify investing in electronic health records and in particular, CPOE. Throughout his career, Bates has published over 600 peer reviewed articles and is the most cited researcher in the fields of both patient safety and biomedical informatics, with an h-index of 115. In a 2013 analysis published by the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, he ranked among the top 400 living biomedical researchers of any type. He is currently editor of the Journal of Patient Safety.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yuval Shahar</span>

Yuval Shahar, M.D., Ph.D., is an Israel professor, physician, researcher and computer scientist

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucila Ohno-Machado</span> Biomedical engineer

Lucila Ohno-Machado is a biomedical engineer and the chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics and associate dean for informatics and technology at UC San Diego. She is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the National Academy of Medicine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dean F. Sittig</span> US Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Bioengineering

Dean Forrest Sittig is an American biomedical informatician specializing in clinical informatics. He is a professor in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and Executive Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative (CIRCLE). Sittig was elected as a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in 2011, and was a founding member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics in 2017. Since 2004, he has worked with Joan S. Ash, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University to interview several Pioneers in Medical Informatics, including G. Octo Barnett, MD, Morris F. Collen, MD, Donald E. Detmer, MD, Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD, Nina W. Matheson, ML, DSc, Clement J. McDonald, MD, and Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD.

Teri E. Klein is an American professor of Biomedical Data Science and Medicine at Stanford University. She is known for her work on pharmacogenomics and computational biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas Tatonetti</span> American bioscientist and academic

Nicholas Tatonetti is an American bioscientist who is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Chief Officer of Cancer Data Science at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University. His lab develops data mining approaches to understand clinical and molecular data.

References

  1. 1. Rule-Based Expert Systems: The MYCIN Experiments of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project -(edited by Bruce G. Buchanan and Edward H. Shortliffe; ebook version http://www.aaaipress.org/Classic/Buchanan/buchanan.html )
  2. Greenes, R. A.; Buchanan, B. G.; Ellison, D. (2007). "Presentation of the 2006 Morris F. Collen Award to Edward H. (Ted) Shortliffe". Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 14 (3): 376–85. doi:10.1197/jamia.M2374. PMC   2244891 . PMID   17557382.
  3. "Professor to lead national biomedical organization". ASU Now: Access, Excellence, Impact. 2008-09-22. Retrieved 2017-02-18.
  4. Clancey WJ, Shortliffe EH, eds. Readings in medical artificial intelligence:the first decade. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1984
  5. Boxwala AA, Peleg M, Tu S, Ogunyemi O, Zeng QT, Wang D, Patel VL, Greenes RA, Shortliffe EH. `GLIF3: a representation format for sharable computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines.' Journal of Biomedical Informatics 2004;37(3):147-161.
  6. "Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics". Columbia University. Retrieved January 15, 2017.
  7. "AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award". AMIA Doctoral Dissertation Award website. AMIA. Retrieved 22 August 2019.
  8. "Awards - Past Winners | AMIA". Archived from the original on October 6, 2008. Retrieved 2009-08-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  9. Masys, D. (2006). "Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine". JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association. 296 (21): 2624. doi:10.1001/jama.296.21.2624.