Jonathan Nebeker, M.D., M.S.

Dr. Nebeker is Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Veterans Health Administration (VHA) and Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah. His degrees and training took place at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. He practices geriatrics at the Salt Lake City VA Medical Center.

He has been the clinical and/or informatics lead of all EHR-related programs at VA from 2014 through 2017 and continues to lead many today. He works with other federal agencies and industry associations on standards and best practices to help VHA participate in markets of health IT and content.

His research has three areas of focus: adverse drug events, human interface design, and analytical systems/advanced process analysis. His work concerning the characterization, epidemiology, and prevention of adverse drug events is widely cited. Much of this work concerns how EHRs help or don’t help prevent these events. From 2005 through 2015, he focused on translating basic science of cognitive and social psychology to medical informatics and EHR design. Randomized controlled trials of his novel user-interface designs have demonstrated increased accuracy of and decreased time to diagnosis of medical conditions. He incorporates these lessons into the design of VA’s EHR systems. In 2008, he established the scientific computing infrastructure for Veterans Health Administration. He recently catalyzed VA's modernization to modern analytical systems. His research now focuses on machine learning and artificial intelligence for human and electronic process control in support of a highly reliable, learning health system.

Research Statement

Dr. Nebeker directs active research projects on translating theory from the cognitive and social sciences to guide the design of software for clinicians, for real-time surveillance of safe operation and safe use of EHR systems, and for design of information systems for real-time analytics.

Global Impact