Richard Shiffman, MCIS,MD

Richard Shiffman is Associate Director of the Center for Medical Informatics and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Shiffman received BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and served as pediatric resident at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital for Children. He was Chief Resident at the University of Colorado Medical Center and completed a fellowship there in developmental pediatrics. Dr. Shiffman practiced primary care pediatrics in Colorado for 12 years and earned a Masters in Computer Information Systems from the University of Denver. He completed a fellowship in medical informatics at the Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women's Hospital, before joining the faculty at Yale. Dr. Shiffman's primary research activities have been directed toward the use of guideline knowledge in computer-based decision support systems. He pioneered the use of decision tables for guideline knowledge representation and verification of completeness and consistency. The model was extended to create ìaugmentedî tables that can store and manipulate information about evidence quality, test parameters, costs, and patient preferences. This work served as a basis for the Guideline Elements Model (GEM), an XML-based hierarchic document model for guidelines. Dr. Shiffman studied the effectiveness of an asthma decision support system on handheld computers in private practice and led a group that developed a computer-based system to support pediatric health maintenance activities at Yale, using a variety of scanning technologies for structured recording, storage, and manipulation of data. Dr. Shiffman served as Chair of an Expert Meeting on Information Technology in Children's Healthcare sponsored by AHRQ. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and served two terms as chairman of its Section on Computers and Other Technology. In addition, he serves on the AAP Task Force on Medical Informatics and the Steering Committee on Quality Improvement and Management. Dr. Shiffman won a Generalist Physician Faculty Scholars Award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and served on an Institute of Medicine Committee to advise the AHCPR.