Designing and Implementing AI: Organizing Committee
Organizing Committee
Jorie Butler, PhD, Lead Chair
Dr. Butler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Geriatrics, at University of Utah. A behavioral scientist by training who specializes in sociotechnical systems, she received her PhD from University of California, Irvine. Dr. Butler is an investigator in the Informatics focused Center of Innovation (COIN) at the Salt Lake City Veterans Medical Center. She is interested in using sociotechnical and cognitive informatics to support AI implementation across clinical contexts. Her work as single or multiple PI has been funded by AHRQ, NIH, and VA HSR&D.
Joseph Finkelstein, MD, PhD,FAMIA, FACMI, Co-Chair
Dr. Finkelstein is a Professor and Vice-Chair of Clinical Data Science and Telemedicine Informatics at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. After obtaining an MD and PhD degree in Biomedical Cybernetics, Dr. Finkelstein completed a post-doctoral fellowship in Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University, where he also obtained a master’s degree in biomedical informatics. Prior to the University of Utah, he served as the Chief Research Informatics Officer, Senior Associate Dean for Information Technology, and Professor of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Finkelstein’s research focuses on the development, evaluation, and implementation of novel healthcare technologies aimed at facilitating the delivery of precision digital health interventions to improve healthcare outcomes. His research includes (1) AI-driven personalized interactive patient engagement, empowerment, and counseling; (2) AI-enhanced telehealth and telerehabilitation for guideline-concordant disease management, and care coordination; and (3) data science and healthcare analytics for quality improvement and predictive modeling of individual chronic disease trajectories. Currently, he serves as Principal Investigator on the NHLBI-funded clinical trial aimed to assess the comprehensive informatics framework for pulmonary telerehabilitation, and a DoD- funded clinical trial to evaluate AI-assisted support of patients with metastatic prostate cancer on androgen deprivation therapy residing in rural areas.
Michael Matheny, MD, MS, MPH, Co-Chair
Dr. Matheny is a practicing general internist and medical informatician. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.D from the University of Kentucky, completed Internal Medicine residency training at St. Vincent's, Indianapolis, IN, and was an NLM Biomedical Informatics Fellow at Decision Systems Group at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Boston, MA during which time he completed a Master’s in public health at Harvard University as well as a master’s of science in biomedical informatics at MIT. He has expertise in developing and adapting methods for post-marketing medical device surveillance, and has been involved in the development, evaluation, and validation of automated outcome surveillance statistical methods and computer applications. He is leading the OMOP extract, transform, and load team within VINCI for the national VHA data, and is a Co-Principal Investigator for the pScanner CDRN Phase 2. He also is currently independently funded for two VA HSR&D IIR's in automated surveillance and data visualization techniques for acute kidney injury following cardiac catheterization and patients with cirrhosis. His key focus areas include natural language processing, data mining and population health analytics as well as health services research in acute kidney injury, diabetes, and device safety in interventional cardiology.
Peter Taber, PhD, Co-Chair
Dr. Taber is a sociocultural anthropologist and clinical informaticist who received his PhD from the University of Arizona (Sociocultural Anthropology) and MS from the University of Utah (Biomedical Informatics). Dr. Taber is faculty within the University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Taber brings theoretical and methodological expertise as an anthropologist and ethnographer to understand the interaction of organizational context, work routines and lived experience; and as an informaticist to understand the technical dimensions of care, with an emphasis on clinical decision support. His research interest focuses on using the combined insights of anthropology and informatics to ensure that the development of novel clinical technologies a) responds to the nature of healthcare settings as intrinsically social and cultural contexts; and b) recognizes that clinical technology development and implementation is an inevitably social and political intervention that requires participatory approaches.