The Clinical Informatics program within the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies invites the public to its monthly conference sessions as part of the school’s Clinical Informatics Conference course.
The next free, virtual conference session takes place on Thursday, Oct. 1, from noon until 2 p.m. EST.
The topic for the October session is "Clinical Decision Support with an Emphasis on Research Aspects." Attendees can join using Zoom.
The speaker is Adam Wright, PhD, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI, professor of biomedical informatics and medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who serves as the director of the Vanderbilt Clinical Informatics Center (VCLIC).
Wright’s research interests focus on clinical decision support and machine learning. He has led projects funded by the National Institutes of Health, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on clinical problem lists, malfunctions in clinical decision support systems, approaches for sharing clinical decision support nationally, and adverse event detection using machine learning. Wright has over 130 peer-reviewed journal publications and nearly 100 additional publications, including abstracts, presentations in scientific meetings, books, and book chapters. He is also a committed teacher, directing and lecturing in local, national, and international courses on biomedical informatics, and teaching medical students.
Wright directs clinical decision support operations at VUMC and previously served as clinical lead for clinical decision support and clinical informatics at Partners HealthCare in Boston. He is active nationally, serving as a board member of the American Medical Informatics Association, an associate editor for Applied Clinical Informatics, and an editorial board member for Methods of Information in Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Wright is also a founding member and director of research for the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative.
Wright’s work has been recognized through numerous awards, including the American Medical Informatics Association New Investigator Award in 2010, election to the American College of Medical Informatics in 2015, the Early Career Achievement Award from Oregon Health and Science University, election to the inaugural class of the Fellowship of the American Medical Informatics Association in 2018, and election to the International Academy of Health Science Informatics in 2019.
Readings for the first hour:
These two articles are related. The first is the development of a clinical decision support guideline; the second is evaluating its effectiveness.
- Awad S, Loveday T, Lau R, Baysari MT. "Development of a Human Factors-Based Guideline to Support the Design, Evaluation, and Continuous Improvement of Clinical Decision Support." Mayo Clin Proc Digit Health. 2024 Nov 27;3(1):100182. doi: 10.1016/j.mcpdig.2024.11.003. PMID: 40206997; PMCID: PMC11975816.
It's hard to find the guideline itself:
- Search for the doi: 10.1016/j.mcpdig.2024.11.003
- Click on the title of the third article, which is the "Development of a human factors..."
- Scroll to "supplemental online material"
- Click on the link "Download: Download acrobat pdf file"
- Read especially appendices 3a and 3
If you can't get the appendix, let the instructors know, and we will send it separately.
- Awad S, Loveday T, Baillie A, Baysari MT. "Evaluation of a clinical decision support design guideline." J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2026 Aug 27:ocag138. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocag138. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 42658575.
Readings for the second hour:
These two studies have intriguing and compelling results. In your discussions, we'd like you to focus also on the methodologies the researchers used to perform the studies. Much of informatics, like medicine, is subjective and hard to quantify. These authors strove to get as close to objective metrics of the CDS they were examining.
- Christensen MA, Beebe R, Chen A, Reale C, Faiman J, Wrenn JO, Gradwohl SC, Slagle JM, Weitkamp AO, Nance BA, Kuttler KG, Carr JR, Peltan ID, Brown SM, Dean NC, Anders S, Ward MJ. "User-Centered Redesign of a Clinical Decision Support System for Pneumonia in the Emergency Department." Appl Clin Inform. 2026 Jan;17(1):89-98. doi: 10.1055/a-2808-9190. Epub 2026 Feb 27. PMID: 41760359; PMCID: PMC12948636.
- Bryan D Steitz, Oluwateniayo O Ogunsan, Jessica Ancker, Brian Carlson, Leslie S Gaynor, Robin T. Higashi, Emily L Morrow, Thomas J Reese, Raymond R. Romano III, Sarah Stern, Robert W Turer, S Trent Rosenbloom, Adam Wright. "Development and Internal Validation of a Large Language Model Pipeline for Multi-Label Classification of Patient Portal Messages." medRxiv 2026.08.14.26360460; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.14.26360460
The INFO 610: Clinical Informatics Conference course is a monthly conference in biomedical and health informatics. Students are introduced to experts in the field of biomedical informatics, exposing them to key experimental and theoretical literature in the discipline, and encouraging discussion and further in-depth exploration of topics in clinical informatics.
The course emphasizes the application of informatics to the practice of medicine, to enhance health outcomes, improve patient care, and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship. The course expands on fundamental clinical informatics content, including clinical decision-making, process improvement, health information systems, ethics, and management.
While attendees who are not enrolled in the course do not receive course credit, these conference sessions, which focus on biomedical and health informatics, are open to the public.
For more information or updates on future conference sessions, please contact Michael Grasso, MD, PhD, FACP, FAMIA, ABPM-CI, clinical associate professor, Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, at mgrasso@som.umaryland.edu.