Majid Afshar, MD, MSCR

Dr. Afshar is a physician-scientist and helps lead a data science laboratory in the Department of Medicine dedicated to the prevention and early identification of diseases with a focus on clinical translational natural language processing. Dr. Afshar and colleagues have built an infrastructure to perform predictive analytics using artificial intelligence with electronic health record data for screening and diagnosis of diseases in critically ill patients. He has hosted several national data challenges to advance the science in diagnostic decision support and is a chartered member of the Center for Scientific Review at the NIH. He practices clinically as an intensive care doctor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he takes care of patients with conditions that are also the focus of his research. He currently has multiple grants to implement and study AI models in the health system and examine the effectiveness of real-time AI for clinical decision support.

In addition to his research focus, Dr. Afshar is also the Director of the Learning Health System in UW-Madison’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards. He has helped to build a program supported by both the university and health system to perform data-driven, bedside evaluation of interventions to improve healthcare delivery. Dr. Afshar is also a board-certified clinical informaticist and part of the UW Health informatics leadership team and has helped with the implementation and evaluation of emerging technologies. He helped guide one of the first real-time natural language processing pipelines in healthcare delivery for clinical decision support. In addition, he is part of the pioneering work to deploy generative AI technologies, including large language models, in health operations.