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, Sept. 3, from noon until 2 p.m. The topic for the September session is Overarching Principles of Clinical Informatics. Attendees can join using Zoom.
The speaker is Randa M. Perkins, MD, MBA, FAMIA, who serves as Dartmouth Health's chief health information officer (CHIO), overseeing clinical informatics for the health care system and serving as a practicing family medicine physician. In this and her prior CHIO roles, she leads clinical IT strategy, guides technical and design teams, and has previously built and led a clinical informatics fellowship program. She also serves as an associate professor in the department of community and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College.
Earlier in her career, Perkins practiced as a family medicine hospitalist at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare and taught at the Florida State University College of Medicine. Her contributions to health informatics have shaped the field at a national level. She serves on the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee advising the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT, contributes to national policy and research efforts, and contributes to the American Medical Informatics Association, where she has participated in panel discussions and has presented posters and manuscripts.
Perkins attended medical school at Florida State and earned a master of business administration degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She holds active board certifications in family medicine from the American Board of Family Medicine and clinical informatics from the American Board of Preventive Medicine. She regularly publishes papers in clinical informatics.
Readings for the first hour:
- Parker Seegmiller, Joseph Gatto, Sarah E. Greer, Ganza Belise Isingizwe, Rohan Ray, Timothy E. Burdick, and Sarah Masud Preum. 2026. "How Much Would a Clinician Edit This Draft? Evaluating LLM Alignment for Patient Message Response Drafting" [aclanthology.org]. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 32620–32646, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Crowe B, Shah S, Teng D, Ma SP, DeCamp M, Rosenberg EI, Rodriguez JA, Collins BX, Huber K, Karches K, Zucker S, Kim EJ, Rotenstein L, Rodman A, Jones D, Richman IB, Henry TL, Somlo D, Pitts SI, Chen JH, Mishuris RG. "Recommendations for Clinicians, Technologists, and Healthcare Organizations on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: A Position Statement from the Society of General Internal Medicine." J Gen Intern Med. 2025 Feb;40(3):694-702. doi: 10.1007/s11606-024-09102-0. Epub 2024 Nov 12. PMID: 39531100; PMCID: PMC11861482.
Readings for the second hour:
- Silver AM, Goodman LA, Burton M, Rangan P, Chadha R, Thomas AK, O'Donnell C. "Optimizing Discharge Summaries: A Survey of Inpatient Clinician Perspectives and the Path to Standardization." J Gen Intern Med. 2026 Jan;41(2):323-329. doi: 10.1007/s11606-025-09740-y. Epub 2025 Jul 25. PMID: 40711633; PMCID: PMC12894564. The full text is available via the Springer link.
- Moura L, Mishuris RG, Metlay JP, Habib M, You JG, Gallagher KL, Brodney S, Rieu-Werden ML, Haas JS. "Comparative effectiveness of ambient documentation tools in primary care tool-specific variations in efficiency, documentation burden, and productivity over time." JAMIA Open. 2026 Aug 11;9(4):ooag155. doi: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooag155. PMID: 42583084; PMCID: PMC13458937. This is an open access journal article.
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.