William M. Tierney, M.D., president and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, will receive the 2011 Morris F. Collen Award from AMIA, the largest international professional biomedical informatics association, at the opening plenary session of AMIA's 35th Annual Symposium on Biomedical and Health Informatics in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 23.
On Oct. 26, Dr. Tierney, who also is the associate dean for clinical effectiveness research at the Indiana University School of Medicine, will present the symposium's closing keynote address.
Dr. Tierney is being honored with the Collen Award for his "persistent efforts to advance the field of biomedical and health informatics, and thus, to exalt data-driven and computer-assisted health care as the norm, both in the United States and globally."
An international leader in biomedical informatics and health services research, Dr. Tierney studies the effects of computer-based interventions to improve health care quality and lower costs of health care delivery. He has received more than $40 million as principal investigator in grants and contracts from federal agencies and research foundations and has published more than 270 articles in peer-reviewed journals.
A graduate of Indiana University and the IU School of Medicine and one of the Regenstrief Institute's first post-graduate trainees, Dr. Tierney has spent his 30-year career as a physician-investigator at Regenstrief and the IU School of Medicine, where he is a Chancellor's Professor and Sam Regenstrief Professor of Health Services Research. He is an associate director of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.
Dr. Tierney also is chief of internal medicine for Wishard Health Services where he practices as a hospital-based internist. Wishard is the country's third largest safety net health care system and where much of Regenstrief's informatics development has taken place. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science, a master of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and a former president of the Society of General Internal Medicine.
He has implemented and studied hospital and outpatient health informatics tools in Indiana and in Africa. He was the founding director of ResNet, one of the oldest and most productive primary care practice-based research networks in the United States.
Dr. Tierney's research has focused on implementing electronic health record systems (EHRs) in hospitals and outpatient clinics both in Indiana and in East Africa, where his team of developers implemented sub-Saharan Africa's first ambulatory EHR. It has grown to a comprehensive EHR that supports a network of more than 50 primary-care clinics in Kenya. This EHR now contains more than 100 million observations derived from more than 3 million visits by more than 300,000 patients. With help from developers at the Regenstrief Institute, Partners in Health, and the Research Council of South Africa, the system was the model for the open-source 'OpenMRS,' the most widely implemented EHR in the developing world.
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