Christopher Cimino, MD

A 1980 graduate of Brown University, Christopher Cimino earned his MD from SUNY Stony Brook in 1994 and then completed residency training in internal medicine and neurology at Bronx Municipal Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. He then moved to Boston for a medical informatics fellowship at the Laboratory of Computer Science at Massachusetts General Hospital. A finalist in the SCAMC student paper competition in both 1990 and 1991, Dr. Cimino went on to join the neurology faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he is now a professor of clinical neurology and Director of Computer-Based Education (an office that he founded). One of the first to formally study physicians' questions as they review clinical information, he was also one of the pioneers in demonstrating a practical use of the UMLS Knowledge Sources. He contributed to the development of the first multiinstitutional EMR (in Boston) and played an important role in the development of a standardized vocabulary for DXplain. For more than a decade, Dr. Cimino has examined how the application of informatics principles in education can be used both to improve education and to demonstrate the usefulness of informatics in the academic and health care environments. He has encouraged student projects that develop ideas that are applicable to more rigorous health care environments, many of which have resulted in student publications, while demonstrating to trainees how they personally can use informatics tools to have a direct and powerful impact on a medical environment. He has established a medical informatics curriculum that ensures that every graduate has an understanding of MEDLINE searching, the use of unique identifiers to build a personal portfolio of medical articles, an understanding of HIPAA, and the impact of communications tools on lifelong learning and patient care. He is also interested in the unique problems faced by educators in trying to inform others about medical informatics and its educational and practical role.