David Lobach, MD

A biology graduate of Bucknell University in 1980, Dr. Lobach moved to the MD/PhD program at Duke University where he earned a PhD in immunology in 1986 and his medical degree in 1987. During his medical residency and an endocrinology fellowship, he became increasingly interested in medical informatics and earned an additional MS in medical informatics in the Duke program in 1994. Joining the faculty at Duke in 1995, he rose to his current role as an associate professor in both the Department of Community and Family Medicine and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He has been Chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics since 1999. Dr. Lobachís work has attracted wide attention since his first SCAMC paper won the meetingís Best Paper award in 1994. He is perhaps best known for his demonstration of the effectiveness of disease-specific, patient-tailored, clinical practice guidelines integrated with electronic patient record systems. He has published a rigorous evaluation of this decision support approach in a randomized, controlled trial and has shown us how to enhance this form of integrated guideline to include clinician-specific performance feedback (also evaluated in a randomized, controlled trial). He has also developed a methodology for local adaptation of clinical practice guidelines and has demonstrated a process for converting text into a computable algorithm. A former NLM trainee, Dr. Lobach is now Chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Duke University Medical Center. He has brought together a core group of 20 faculty members who focus on issues related to medical informatics research and teaching at Duke. This group has become the focal point for academic medical informatics at Duke and has formed bridges between the academic informaticians and senior level operational support staff for the Duke Medical Center Information Systems group.