EHR Advisory Board

Dean F. Sittig, MS, PhD, FACMI
Associate Professor, School of Health Information Sciences
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Member, University of Texas, Houston-Memorial Hermann Center for Healthcare Quality and Safety

Dr. Sittig was awarded a masters degree in biomedical engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and a PhD in medical informatics from the University of Utah in 1988. In 1992 he was elected as a Fellow in The American College of Medical Informatics.

Dr. Sittig’s research interests center on the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of all aspects of clinical information

systems. In addition to Dr. Sittig’s work on measuring the impact of clinical information systems on a large scale, he is working to improve our understanding of both the factors that lead to success, as well as, the unintended consequences associated with computer-based clinical decision support and provider order entry systems. Towards this end, he is a co-founder of The IMPROVE-IT Institute (IMPROVE-IT = indices measuring performance relating outcomes, value, and expenditures). The goal of IMPROVE-IT is to develop a world-wide consortium of organizations interested in learning about and improving the processes surrounding the implementation and use of all aspects of clinical information systems.

He is currently the lead investigator of the clinical knowledge management and CCHIT teams within the AHRQ Clinical Decision Support Consortium.

Prior to joining the University of Texas, Houston, he worked for Northwest Permanente Medical Group which is associated with the Kaiser Permanente Hospitals and Health Plan as their Director of Applied Research in Medical Informatics. He previously worked for the Knowledge Technology group at Healtheon/WebMD in Portland, OR. While there he was investigating various aspects of the use of the Internet for the provision of health care. Prior to this he worked in the Clinical Systems Research & Development group within the Information Systems department of Partners HealthCare System in Boston, MA. He was responsible for the design and development of the Clinical Application Suite, an integrated software architecture that facilitates the maintenance of the patient and user context as one switches between applications. Prior to joining Partners, Dean worked with Perry Miller in the Anesthesiology department at Yale University and with Bill Stead in the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University. He has had a wide range of experiences within the field of Medical Informatics since receiving his Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from The University of Utah where he worked under the direction of Reed M. Gardner, Alan H. Morris, and Terry P. Clemmer at the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, UT.

He recently finished co-authoring an award-winning book on clinical decision support entitled, “Improving Outcomes – A Practical Guide to Clinical Decision Support Implementation”.

Finally, he is the founding editor of both The Informatics Review, an on-line serial devoted to helping clinicians and information system professionals keep up to date with the field of clinical informatics, and The ClinfoWiki, an interactive, collaborative on-line clinical informatics reference resource.

For a listing of most of Dean F. Sittig’s scientific articles see: http://Sittig-in-PubMed.notlong.com.

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