Bonnie Kaplan, PhD

Bonnie Kaplan is a Lecturer at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics and a member of Yale University's Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project, a Senior Scientist in the Medical Information Systems Unit at Boston University, and President of Kaplan Associates. She holds an interdisciplinary bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of Chicago in the History department's program on the History of Science and Medicine. Her doctoral dissertation concerned the development of medical informatics. Dr. Kaplan's interest in medical informatics dates to high school, where she learned computer programming at Downstate Medical Center and also in a NSF program at City University of New York. After studying computer science as an undergraduate, she conducted oral history interviews as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Computer History Project. Later in her graduate studies, she was a programmer/analyst at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics and at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. In these positions, she wrote clinical computer applications that included a patient record system for radiation oncology and, with a colleague, an order-entry and results reporting system for a pediatrics biochemistry laboratory. She served on the ASTM E31.07 (later E31.13) standards committee for automated clinical laboratory systems. Given her interest on the history and sociology of science, technology and medicine, her recent focus has been on ìevaluationî and ìpeople and organizational issues.î Dr. Kaplan was a founding member of both the People and Organizational Issues Working Group (POI WG) in AMIA and IMIA WG-13: Organizational and Social Issues. She chairs each of these working groups and edits their joint newsletter with EFMI's WG9: Human and Organizational Issues. Dr. Kaplan served on the program committee for the ACM Conference on the History of Medical Informatics at the National Library of Medicine in 1987. In 1999, she was appointed to chair AMIA's task force in consumer health informatics. She served on the Scientific Program Committee of the AMIA Spring 2000 Congress. She is on the Scientific Program Committee for the AMIA 2001 Symposium. In 2000, Dr. Kaplan received the AMIA President's Award.