William (bill) R. Hersh MD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI, FACP

William Hersh, MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology in the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) in Portland, Oregon, USA. Dr. Hersh is a leader and innovator in biomedical informatics both in education and research.

Dr. Hersh’s main research efforts are in the area of information retrieval (also known as search) applied to biomedicine. He has authored over 200 scientific papers and abstracts as well as the book, Information Retrieval A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Springer, 2009), which has an associated Web site. His current work focuses on the application of search techniques to electronic health record data, aiming to improve patient cohort discovery and amplification of signals of rare diseases.

His research activities have also included conducting systematic reviews of the efficacy of informatics interventions, including telemedicine and health information exchange. He has also investigated the quantity and characteristics of the workforce needed to implement health information technology, especially in clinical settings.

Dr. Hersh is also a leader in informatics education. He serves as Director of OHSU’s Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program, which is one of the oldest and largest in the world and offers Master’s and Ph.D. degrees as well as a Graduate Certificate in Clinical Informatics. He also spearheaded OHSU’s efforts in distance learning for biomedical informatics.

Dr. Hersh has led a number of innovations in biomedical informatics education. He conceptualized and implemented the first offering of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10x10 (“ten by ten”) program, which has been completed by over 2500 health care professionals and others in biomedical informatics. He has also been funded by the US Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) to develop national curricula for health IT and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program to develop open educational resources in biomedical data science.