Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, has been appointed chief of the newly created Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT) at UC San Francisco. The new division will promote the integration and application of information technology to improve patient care. It will serve as the academic home for applied clinical informatics researchers, UCSF’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship, and foster research, career development, DEI and new education and training programs.
Adler-Milstein is planning major divisional initiatives in digital health equity, artificial intelligence and diagnostic excellence. The new division will develop novel partnerships with industry partners, UCSF affiliates and within the UCSF Health system to guide the continuing digital transformation of health care.
Adler-Milstein is currently a professor of Medicine and the director of UCSF’s Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research (CLIIR). Under her leadership, CLIIR has been awarded more than $20M in grant funding and has collaborated on more than 50 publications with 25 different UCSF co-authors. She came to UCSF in 2017 to launch CLIIR and study how digital tools can make health care safer, more equitable, more satisfying for patients and clinicians, and less expensive.
“Julia is an exceptional academic leader – a highly productive and collaborative researcher, educator and thought leader,” said Robert M. Wachter, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF. “She asks crucial questions and answers them with diverse and novel methods. She is also uniquely skilled at team building, including within UCSF’s complex informatics ecosystem, across the nation and, indeed, the globe. She is ideally positioned to build an internationally acclaimed academic unit in this burgeoning and remarkably dynamic field.”
Prior to arriving at UCSF, she was a faculty member at the University of Michigan, where she distinguished herself as the nation’s top expert in the intersection of health policy and health IT. She received her BA in Human Biology from Stanford in 2001, and her PhD in Health Policy from Harvard in 2011.
During her career, she has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in publications such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Health Affairs. She is an editor of the book, Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health, and is founder of the National Research Network for Audit Log Research. She is an American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) board member and an associate editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Her accomplishments have also been widely recognized. She received the Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award from Academy Health in 2017 and the Don Detmer Award for Health Policy Contributions in Informatics from AMIA in 2018. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the youngest NAM inductees in recent history.
“I couldn’t be more thrilled to be taking on this transformative role at this moment in UCSF’s evolution,” said Adler-Milstein. “Since coming to UCSF six years ago, I have been enriched by the wealth of colleagues who are advancing the field of clinical informatics and impressed by UCSF’s commitment to education in this rapidly evolving and exciting field.”
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