Shortliffe will succeed Detmer at AMIA

The American Medical Informatics Association has named Dr. Edward Shortliffe to succeed Dr. Don Detmer when Detmer retires as AMIA’s president and chief executive officer in July 2009.Shortliffe is a professor of medicine and basic medical sciences at the University of Arizona. Formerly the founding dean of the Arizona medical school’s Phoenix campus, he also teaches biomedical informatics at Arizona State University.An internist, he taught previously at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and at Stanford University, where he spearheaded the formation of the graduate degree program in biomedical informatics in the early 1980s. Shortliffe’s research interests include integrated decision support systems and the role of the Internet in health care.Shortliffe was a founding member of the 20-year-old AMIA. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and a member of many professional associations. He will begin working at AMIA early in 2009 to ease the transition to a new leader, Detmer said in an AMIA announcement.Detmer, who also teaches at the University of Virginia, is widely respected as a leader of the informatics community and a contributor to the development of health IT policies. He has headed AMIA for four years.