Randolph Miller, MD

Randolph A. Miller, MD has contributed to clinical informatics for 40 years. He is also an academic general internist who saw patients for a quarter century. His title at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Biomedical Informatics and University Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Medicine, and Nursing. As a medical student in 1973, he joined the pioneering INTERNIST-I computer-assisted medical diagnosis project at the University of Pittsburgh, working under Dr. Jack D. Myers. At Pitt in 1982, Dr. Miller published one of the first evaluations of a diagnostic expert system, demonstrating the potential and the limitations of such systems. His work over the ensuing decades has focused on refining, improving, and evaluating clinical decision support systems. In 1985, he led development of Quick Medical Reference, one of the first microcomputer-based diagnostic systems. In 1994, Dr. Miller moved to Vanderbilt University Medical Center as Chair of the Division and (in 2001) Department of Biomedical Informatics. In that role, Dr. Miller built a combined academic and clinical informatics unit that developed and evaluated leading-edge biomedical software applications focused on improving quality of care, enhancing patient safety, and exploring new modalities for education. With colleagues at Vanderbilt, Dr. Miller helped to develop WizOrder, a care provider order entry (CPOE) system with integrated decision support. That system has been used throughout Vanderbilt and Duke Medical Centers (among other sites nationally). In addition to improving quality of care, WizOrder introduced effective reductions in resource over-utilization by making it easier to ìorder the right thing at the right timeî. Dr. Miller also contributed to Vanderbilt efforts to create new educational modalities for medical students through the KnowledgeMap project. Dr. Miller served as President/Board Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (1994-95), and the American College of Medical Informatics (2003-04). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the premiere journal in Biomedical Informatics, JAMIA, from July 2002 until December, 2010. He received a 1997 FDA Commissioner's Special Citation for his work on clinical software evaluation. He received the William J. Darby Award for Translational Research from Vanderbilt in 2004. He was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. He was the 2007 recipient of the American Medical Informatics Association Lindberg Award for innovation in informatics. His current research involves using natural language processing methods to extract information from clinical records, and using that information for clinical decision support activities.