Public Biography
My research explores the use of information systems to promote communication and collaboration in patient care and biomedical research. The goal is to develop models that increase our understanding of interactions between information systems and biomedical organizational structures, patterns of work flow, and the specialized languages that professionals employ. This work is a fusion between technical and social disciplines, drawing from computer science, information technology, cognition, linguistics, behavioral and organizational science. Methods include natural language processing, linguistic analysis, content analysis, data modeling, work flow analysis and social network analysis. Applications include electronic health records, research databases, clinical research systems and systems to promote scientific collaboration.
Historic ACMI Biography
Stephen Bennett Johnson is an Associate Professor of Medical Informatics at Columbia University. He received an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from McGill University. His doctorate was also in Computer Science, and he specialized in natural language processing at New York University. Dr. Johnson currently serves as the Director of Informatics for the Cancer Center at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, using information technology to assist in cancer care and research. He also directs the graduate degree program in medical informatics at Columbia. Dr. Johnson has been deeply interested in the area of data modeling and the importance of bringing these techniques into medical informatics. He demonstrated the advantages of data modeling in building the Clinical Data Repository at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, one of the first large-scale relational databases in medicine. This work showed that a patient database could be both flexible and efficient. He has taught data modeling as a tutorial at the AMIA Annual Symposium for several years and at the Woods Hole course on informatics. He has also been a participant in the Unified Medical Language System, with a special interest in showing how data modeling resources can contribute to the area of natural language processing. Dr. Johnson has worked for several years to create a detailed curriculum for medical informatics, emphasizing the importance of the social sciences in providing theoretic foundations for the field. His current area of research is knowledge extraction from medical and scientific texts.
Affiliations
The American College of Medical Informatics
ACMI is a college of elected Fellows from the U.S. and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. It is the central body for a community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the informatics field.
Year Elected
1999