Adler-Milstein to Lead UCSF’s New Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation

Julia Adler-Milstein, Ph.D., has been named the founding chief of the Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT) in the Department of Medicine (DOM) at UCSF.

Adler-Milstein is a professor of medicine and the director of UCSF’s Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research (CLIIR). 

In a letter to colleagues, Robert Wachter, M.D., chair of the Department of Medicine, explained the reasoning behind the creation of DoC-IT. “Guided by a multidisciplinary task force led by Sara Murray and Urmimala Sarkar, I came to believe that a division in the DOM unifying our many initiatives and people in clinical informatics – in areas ranging from research to clinical care and operations to education to policy development and advocacy – would yield enormous advantages to our department and UCSF more generally,” he wrote.

Wachter called Adler-Milstein a “highly productive and collaborative researcher, educator, and thought leader. 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.”

In a message on the DoC-IT website, Adler-Milstein described her goal as allowing “this extraordinary community to be better coordinated, more robustly supported, and even more impactful. I am confident that we will quickly see tangible benefits – more grants, papers, and projects that examine the broad set of technologies (including ChatGPT!) in terms of both the value and the risks they bring. We will recruit new faculty – particularly in cutting-edge areas such as applying AI to real-world care, using informatics to advance health equity and address social determinants of health, and achieving diagnostic excellence.”

She added that DoC-IT will partner with UCSF Health, and over time our other affiliated health systems, to ensure that their research informs how to use technology to deliver the best care to patients.

Adler-Milstein received her Ph.D. in Health Policy from Harvard in 2011. She then joined the faculty 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 joined UCSF in 2017.

In a 12-year faculty career, she has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in NEJM, JAMA, Health Affairs, and other top journals. She is currently funded with 16 grants totaling over $2.5M in direct costs per year, including 11 federal grants and several others from major foundations, such as the John A. Hartford and the Gordon and Betty Moore foundations.

She is an editor of the book, Diagnosing in the Home: The Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Home Health, founder of the National Research Network for Audit Log Research, and associate editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). She is also an AMIA board member.

Wachter noted that while much of its early activity is likely to focus on the UCSF Health system, “we are designing it to be a cross-site division, and so faculty at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and the VA will actively engage in its activities. It will become the primary academic home for CLIIR faculty and our highly successful Clinical Informatics fellowship. It will oversee the UCSF Digital Collaborative, which brings together leaders of UCSF’s digital community. Julia is also planning major divisional initiatives in digital health equity, artificial intelligence, and diagnostic excellence.”

In addition to serving as the primary divisional home for interested faculty, DoC-IT will become a hub for DOM academic informatics activities, such that other DOM informatics-oriented faculty may choose to have secondary appointments in the new division.