Dr. James Cimino is a board-certified internist who completed a National Library of Medicine informatics fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University and went on to an academic position at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. He spent 20 years at Columbia, carrying out clinical informatics research, building clinical information systems, teaching medical informatics and medicine, and caring for patients, rising to the rank of full professor in both Biomedical Informatics and Medicine. His principal research areas included desiderata for controlled terminologies, mobile and Web-based clinical information systems for clinicians and patients, and a context-aware form of clinical decision support called “infobuttons.”
In 2008, he moved to the National Institutes of Health, where was Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development at the NIH Clinical Center and the National Library of Medicine. His principal project involved the development of the Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS), an NIH-wide clinical research data resource. In 2015, he moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to become the inaugural director of the Informatics Institute and a Professor of Medicine, where he leads educational programs, directs research informatics support for UAB’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science, teaches clinical medicine in the UAB Hospital, and carries out informatics research focused on developing the next-generation electronic health record. He continues to teach at Columbia University as an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics.
He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the American College of Medical Informatics (where he previously served as President). He is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly, the Institute of Medicine). His honors include the Priscilla Mayden Award from the University of Utah, the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics and the President’s Award, both from the American Medical Informatics Association, and the NIH Clinical Center Director’s Award (twice).