Biosketch

After graduating from Brown University and earning the MD degree at the New York Medical College, Cimino interned and completed residency training in medicine at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. He went on to complete a research fellowship in medical informatics at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard.

Before accepting his current position, a dual appointment to the National Library of Medicine, Cimino was as professor of biomedical informatics and medicine at Columbia University. His primary research interests include medical concept representation and using it to support clinical decision-making. Since 1991, he has received significant grant support, primarily through the NLM, as principal investigator on projects related to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a concept NLM says is to facilitate the development of computer systems that behave as if they "understand" the meaning of the language of biomedicine and health.

Cimino has been an active member of the NLM Board of Scientific Counselors, co-chair of the HL-7 Vocabulary Technical Committee, and on the board of the American Medical Informatics Association.

He continues to hold an appointment as an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Informatics [disclaimer] at Columbia University.

Honors and Awards

Cimino is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the American College of Physicians.  In 2006 he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Medical College and was elected to fellowship in the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2002 he received the President's Award from the American Medical Informatics Association.

Selected Publications

Cimino has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles on medical informatics and is the co-editor of the leading text for medical informatics “Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine,” published in 2006.  He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and on the editorial board of BioMed Central.

BOOKS and PROCEEDINGS

Shortliffe EH, Cimino JJ, Eds.  Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine.  Springer, New York, 2006.

Cimino JJ, ed.  Proceedings of the American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium.  AMIA, Bethesda, MD, 1996.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Cimino JJ.  Cancer Screening.  In Shea S, ed.  Division of General Internal Medicine Ambulatory Care Syllabus.  Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York; 1994.

Huff SM, Cimino JJ.  Medical Data Dictionaries and their Use in Medical Information System Development.  In:  Prokosch HU, Dudeck J, eds.  Hospital Information Systems: Current Status and Future Trends, Elsevier Science B.V., North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1995; 53-75.

Clayton PD, Cimino JJ, Anderson RK, Roderer NK, McCormack M.  Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS): Accomplishments from a global and local perspective.  In:  Prokosch HU, Dudeck J, eds.  Hospital Information Systems: Current Status and Future Trends, Elsevier Science B.V., North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1995; 287-311.

Pablos-Mendez A, Cimino JJ.  Screening.  In Rabkin M, Shea S, ed.  Ambulatory Care Syllabus.  Division of General Internal Medicine Ambulatory Care Syllabus.  Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York; 1997.

Ceusters WM, Rector AL, Cimino JJ.  Chap 23: Lenguajes y Terminologías Médica (Medical Languages and Terminologies).  In: Internet, Telemática y Salud (Internet in the Health Sciences).  Oliveri N, Sosa-Iudicissa M, Gamboa C, eds.  Editorial Médica Panamerica, Buenos Aires, 1997.

Cimino JJ.  Development of Expertise in Medical Practice.  In, Sternberg RJ, Horvath JA, eds.  Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Hammond WE, Cimino JJ.  Standards in Medical Informatics.  Chapter 6 in: EH Shortliffe, LE Perreault, G Wiederhold, LM Fagan, eds. Medical Informatics:  Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine.  New York:  Springer, 2000:212-256.

Cimino JJ.  Knowledge-based terminology in medicine.  In:  Bourigault D, Jacquemin C, L’Homme M-C, eds.  Recent Advances in Computational Terminology.John Benjamins, Amsterdam.  2001:111-126.

Kukafka R, Lussier YA, Cimino JJ.  The MI-HEART Project.  Chapter 19, in: Lewis D, Eyesnbach G, Kukafka R, Stavri P, Jimison H, eds. Consumer Health Informatics:  Informing Consumers and Improving Health Care.  New York:  Springer, 2005:227-238.

Cimino JJ, del Fiol G.  Infobuttons and point of care access to knowledge.  In: Greenes RA, ed.  Clinical Decision Support: The Road Ahead.  Amsterdam:  Elsevier, 2007:345-371.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Cimino JJ, Munson PJ, Lewis T, Rodbard D: Graphical Display of Patient Data Using a Desk-Top Computer, in Heffernan HG, ed.: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium on  Computer Applications in Medical Care; Washington, D.C.; October, 1981:1085-1088.

Cimino JJ, Barnett GO: Automated Translation Between Medical Terminologies Using Semantic Definitions, Proceedings of the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics Congress 1989, May 10, 1989: 113-117.  Selected for reprint in MD Computing, March-April, 1990; 7(2):104-109.

Cimino JJ, Elkin PL, Barnett GO.  As We May Think: The Concept Space and Medical Hypertext.  Computers and Biomedical Research, 1992; 25(3):238-263.

Cimino JJ, Socratous SA, Clayton PD.  Internet as clinical information system: application development using the World Wide Web.  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; 1995;2(5):273-284.

Cimino JJ.  Linking patient information systems to bibliographic resources.  Methods of Information in Medicine; 1996;35(2):122-126.

Cimino JJ.  Beyond the Superhighway: Exploiting the Internet with Medical Informatics.  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; 1997;4:279-284.

Cimino JJ.  Distributed cognition and knowledge-based controlled medical terminologies.  Artificial Intelligence in Medicine; 1998;12(2):155-170.

Cimino JJ.  Desiderata for controlled medical vocabularies in the Twenty-First Century.  Methods of Information in Medicine; 1998;37(4-5):394-403.

Cimino JJ.  From data to knowledge through concept-oriented terminologies: experience with the Medical Entities Dictionary.  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association; 2000;7(3):288-297.

Cimino JJ, Patel VL, Kushniruk AW.  The Patient Clinical Information System (PatCIS): technical solutions for and experience with giving patients access to their electronic medical records.  International Journal of Medical Informatics; 2002; 68:111-127.

Cimino JJ, Bakken S.  The personal digital educator.  New England Journal of Medicine.  2005;352(9):860-2.

Cimino JJ.  In Defense of the Desiderata.  Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 2006;39(3):299-306.

Cimino JJ, Zhu X.  The practical impact of ontologies on biomedical informatics.  Methods Inf Med. 2006;45 Suppl 1:124-35.

Shim E, Silfen E, Patel C, Chiu J, Zhu X, Kelly S, Park N, Allen M, Cimino J.  Towards a reference model for representing nursing information needs.  Stud Health Technol Inform. 2006;122:490-5.

Cimino J.  Collect once, use many - Enabling the reuse of clinical data through controlled terminologies. JAHIMA. 2007;78 (2):24-9.