Joanna Abraham, PhD, FAMIA, associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Institute for Informatics, was elected a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). She was recently recognized at the induction ceremony alongside 13 additional new fellows at the 2022 AMIA Annual Symposium on Sunday, Nov. 6 in Washington D.C.
ACMI Fellows are elected by their peers and are individuals who “have demonstrated major contributions in biomedical and health informatics, have achieved national recognition in the field, and are committed to advancing the charitable, scientific, literary and educational purposes of ACMI,” according to the ACMI website.
Abraham received her PhD from Pennsylvania State University in Information Sciences and Technology with a focus on health informatics, human factors, and human-computer interaction. Before joining Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, she was at the University of Illinois at Chicago, The New York Academy of Medicine, and the University of Texas Health Science Center. She has over 15 years of experience in patient safety, cognitive science, and applied clinical informatics.
Abraham’s research program targets the development of collaborative systems to deliver coordinated and safer care. It focuses on streamlining clinical workflows in a variety of domains, including handoffs and care transitions, care coordination, clinical decision making, and medication ordering. In these domains, her research emphasizes the design and evaluation of health information technologies for continuous and sustained improvements to patient safety.
Abraham has received numerous prestigious awards for her research innovations through several awards including AMIA Diana Forsythe Award (2010, 2021), Distinguished Paper Award (2012), the New Investigator Award (2019) and the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) Distinguished Reviewer Award (2021) along with research mentoring awards at previous institutions. Currently, she chairs the AMIA Diana Forsythe Awards committee, sits on the editorial board for most medical informatics journals including JAMIA, JAMIA Open, and the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), and also serves on the editorial advisory board on the Joint Commission Journal of Patient Safety and Quality. She has participated in multiple scientific program committees for AMIA, Human Factors in Healthcare and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Her research has been supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF), and several other institutional grants.
Congratulations to Dr. Abraham on her election to ACMI! We look forward to your continuing contributions to the informatics field of medicine.