The International Medical Informatics Association(IMIA) has concluded a lengthy election process of living leaders in health
informatics worldwide, who have become the first class of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). The Academy will serve as an
honor society that recognizes expertise in biomedical and health informatics
internationally and membership will be one of the highest honors in the
international field of biomedical and health informatics.
The Academy will serve as an international forum for peers in biomedical and
health informatics and will play an important role in exchanging knowledge,
providing education and training, and producing policy documents, e.g.,
recommendations and position statements.
The first class of the Academy will be inducted during the 16th World
Congress on Medical and Health Informatics in Hangzhou, China from 21st -25th August
2017 and will include Prof. Yuval Shahar, a member of BGU's Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering and the founder and head of BGU's Medical Informatics Research Center.
A similar body has existed for many years in the United States - The American College
of Medical Informatics (ACMI) – which was The American Medical InformaticsAssociation (AMIA). In 2005, Shahar became an international associate of the AMCI,
the first Israeli to do so.
Prof. Shahar
received his MD from the Hebrew University and his PhD in medical information
sciences from Stanford University. He also completed a master’s degree in
mathematics and computer science from Bar Ilan University and a second master’s
degree in computer science from Yale University, with an emphasis on artificial
intelligence.
In 1985, Shahar was appointed head of the Medical Computing Section of
the Israeli Defense Force, working on a strategic decision-support system
connecting 32 hospitals. His first relevant journal paper appeared in 1991, and
he has made continuous contributions ever since. He has served as the founding
director of BGU's Multidisciplinary Medical Informatics Research Center since
2000.
Prof. Shahar has developed many ideas important to computer based
decision support and reasoning about clinical data that have become influential
in the informatics community. His work on temporal abstraction of clinical data
is well known in both the informatics community and the computer-science
community and has been incorporated in a number of deployed applications. His
work on a computational knowledge- based framework known as RESUME for
automated abstraction of time-oriented data into a meaningful, time interval–
based concepts system is at the core of the query and interpretation module of
Stanford University’s EON system for guideline-based care, and has become the
backbone of several new projects that Prof. Shahar has started at BGU for
mediation of temporal queries to patient databases over the Web for diagnosis,
monitoring, therapy, and clinical research.
He has also made substantial contributions to the field of computer-based
clinical guidelines, is a member of the editorial board of several informatics
journals, and an organizer of international symposia on artificial intelligence
in clinical care. In recognition of the broad scope of impact of his academic
efforts, the College honors Prof. Shahar as an international associate.
The IMIA is
the world body for health and biomedical informatics and an ‘association of
associations’. IMIA provides informatics leadership and expertise to the
multidisciplinary health-focused community and to policy makers, to enable the
transformation of healthcare in accord with the world-wide vision of improving
the health of the world population.
