William Hole, MD

William Hole is Research Medical Officer for the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus at the National Library of Medicine. He received his BA in chemistry from Earlham College in Indiana and his MD from Ohio State University. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco and a postdoctoral fellowship in child psychiatry and academic pediatrics at Stanford University. Dr. Brown was Assistant Professor in Pediatrics at Brown University and Director of Information Science at Bradley Hospital. His early work included direct computer recording of the physiology and behavior of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit. Since his arrival at the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Hole has been deeply involved in the UMLS. He has been responsible for the design, creation, and release of 13 annual editions of the Metathesaurus, the largest of the three UMLS Knowledge Sources. Since the initial 1990 experimental release, the Metathesaurus has grown to contain and relate more than 800,000 concepts containing terms from more than 60 biomedical vocabularies, including the current and proposed HIPAA standard terminologies.