Public Biography
Dr. Middletonís work is focused on clinical informatics ñ the applied science surrounding strategy, design, implementation, and evaluation of clinical information systems in clinical environments, or wherever clinical decisions are made. His special interests are in clinical knowledge representation, knowledge sharing, and management for quality measurement and decision support. He has deep experience in team building, innovation, and leadership roles in academe and industry. He was a Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and or of Medicine, at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities, and he held executive leadership roles at MedicaLogic/ Medscape (CMO), Partners Healthcare System (Corporate Director, Clinical Informatics R&D; now Mass General Brigham), and at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (CIO/Assistant Vice Chancellor). Most recently, he was Chief Informatics & Innovation Officer at Apervita, Inc., a provider of a digital health platform for the creation, exchange, and use of data and analytics in healthcare from 2016 to October 2021 when it ceased operations. In this role, he helped Apervita connect to more than 3500 US hospitals for quality measurement and helped design the Apervita Knowledge Studio. He helped to lead the C19 Digital Guidelines Working group and collaborated in developing the HL7 Computable Practice Guideline on FHIR standard, among numerous other roles on Technical Expert Panels, and Advisory Committees (described briefly below, and detailed in the CV). From 2013-2014, he was Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and Chief Informatics Officer (CIO), at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and responsible for information technology supporting clinical informatics, educational informatics, research informatics, and financial systems. During this time, he implemented a comprehensive organizational and process redesign to better achieve world-class software development at scale. During his tenure there, Vanderbilt was recognized as one of the ìMost Wiredî healthcare systems. During his time at Vanderbilt he was also Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and of Medicine (with tenure), and engaged in mentoring junior faculty, Fellows, and students. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he was Corporate Director of Clinical Informatics Research & Development (CIRD) at Partners Healthcare System, Boston, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Womenís Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and a Lecturer in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2001-2013. His work at Partners HealthCare focused on building an advanced informatics infrastructure to support translational research, and the development and implementation of knowledge-based tools for cloud-based clinical decision support, knowledge engineering, population management, and comparative effectiveness research. While at Partners he also was co-founder of the Center for Information Technology Leadership (CITL) and led its research in value-based technology assessment until 2010 when the CITL was moved to Westat, Inc. While at Harvard, he was PI on many large research grants and contracts, and collaborated extensively both intramurally and extramurally on research that resulted in numerous publications reflected on his CV. He maintained an active general internal medicine teaching practice at the Brigham. Prior to that, he was Senior Vice President for Clinical Informatics, and Chief Medical Officer, for MedicaLogic/Medscape, a provider of electronic medical records software (Logicianô), and professional and patient portals (Medscsape.com, and AboutMyHealth.com) from 1995 to 2001. During this time he was adjunct faculty in the Dept of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at OHSU, and maintained an active general medicine teaching practice at Providence Health System St. Vincentís Hospital in Portland. Before that he was Medical Director of Information Management and Technology at Stanford University Medical Center, from 1992 to 1995. At Stanford he was the first to occupy a CMIO type role and lead the implementation of the first clinical data repository at Stanford and was PI for the Bay Area Communication and Health Education Network (BAYCHEN, 1991), and in 1994 co-founder of the Institute for Decision Systems Research in Palo Alto, CA to run NSF-funded grants.
Historic ACMI Biography
Blackford Middleton is Chief Medical Officer at Medscape, Inc. He is also Associate Professor of Medical Informatics and Outcomes Research (Clinical) in the Biomedical Information and Communications Center at Oregon Health Sciences University and attending physician in the Department of Medicine Faculty Practice at Providence St. Vincent's Medical Center, Portland, Oregon. He received a BA degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Colorado at Boulder, an MPH in Chronic Disease Epidemiology from Yale University, an MD from SUNY-Buffalo School of Medicine, and an MSc in Health Services Research from Stanford University. Prior to his current position, Dr. Middleton was a member of the faculty in General Internal Medicine in the Section on Medical Informatics at Stanford, where he served as Medical Director for Information Management and Technology at Stanford University Medical Center. While serving in that position, he led the design and implementation of a comprehensive integrated clinical information management strategy, began the telemedicine program, and was a founder of the Institute for Decision Systems Research. In 1995, Dr. Middleton joined MedicaLogic (which later merged with Medscape) to establish the Clinical Informatics group. He became Chief Medical Officer at Medscape in 2000. Dr. Middleton's interests focus on both the basic and applied science of medical informatics. His fellowship research at Stanford focused on the evaluation of a large-scale probabilistic inference system (QMR-DT) and assessment of various techniques and heuristics to reduce computational complexity. In the applied informatics arena, he has focused on creating an integrated clinical information management model to support efficient clinical decision making by providers and patients, the cost-benefit and return on investment in information technology, and the issues surrounding the design and implementation of practical information systems in complex environments. In recent work, Dr. Middleton has focused on ethical issues surrounding the creation of online health care tools and resources and the appropriate use of the Internet in health care. In his commercial endeavor, Dr. Middleton defined a vision for online health records that may be shared between physician and patient to improve clinical communication and clinical service delivery and enable a new model of collaborative chronic disease management. Dr. Middleton has served on committees in the Computer-based Patient Record Institute (Chairman 1999-2000), the American Medical Informatics Association, the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society, the American College of Physicians, and the Society for Medical Decision Making. Dr. Middleton has served as an expert consultant to the Institute of Medicine, the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Center for Health Statistics, the National Commission on Quality Assurance, and the National Research Council Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems.
Affiliations
The American College of Medical Informatics
ACMI is a college of elected Fellows from the U.S. and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. It is the central body for a community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the informatics field.
Year Elected
2000