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Columbia University's Department of Biomedical Informatics traces it roots to a 1981 National Library of Medicine
(NLM) Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) initiative. The planning and prototype phases of
that initiative led to the creation of the Center for Biomedical Informatics in 1987. In 1994, Columbia University
made the Center a full-fledged department in the health sciences campus, with the same rights and responsibilities
as other departments such as Medicine and Surgery.
Since the beginning, the Department's focus has been on research, teaching, and service. A phase III IAIMS grant
and an IBM contract funded the development of the next generation Clinical Information System (CIS) with a central
clinical repository, a clinical data schema, a knowledge-based vocabulary (Medical Entities Dictionary or MED),
an HL7-based inference engine, an Arden Syntax-based event monitor, and natural language processing (MedLEE). CIS
has served as the Department's living laboratory for biomedical informatics research, as sa training ground for new
informatics researchers, and as Presbyterian Hospital's clinical system. The system is used by 95% of attending
physicians and essentially all residents and fellows. It currently has 4000 unique users per month, and there are
1.7 million patients in the database.
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In 1998, Columbia University's main teaching hospital, Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York, merged with New York Hospital (Cornell University's affiliate) and 15 other hospitals to form New York Presbyterian Healthcare. The new network, which serves five million patients in the greater New York area, has a $4 billion annual budget; $100 million of this is for information systems. The merger brings many exciting informatics challenges related to large systems, data modeling, vocabulary, security, telemedicine, etc. The new network is thus an incredible informatics laboratory, and it can serve as a prototype for nation-wide programs. The chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics serves in a dual role as Director of Medical Informatics Services for New York Presbyterian Healthcare. The responsibilities include the electronic medical record, research databases, application interfaces, vocabulary, event monitor, security, and new application development across the network.
Staffing