George Hripcsak, M.D., M.S. Closed Now

Dr. George Hripcsak is a globally respected leader in biomedical informatics, electronic health record (EHR) systems, and real-world evidence research. He currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and is recognized as one of the principal architects of modern health data standards and interoperability frameworks.

A major contribution of Dr. Hripcsak is his leadership in the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program, an international collaborative effort spanning over 30 countries and hundreds of institutions. OHDSI develops open-source tools and methods to analyze large-scale clinical data, enabling researchers to generate real-world evidence (RWE) that informs better healthcare decisions and accelerates medical discovery.

His research has shaped the development of clinical decision support systems, temporal reasoning in patient records, and natural language processing for healthcare applications. He has published extensively in journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMIA, and Nature Medicine, influencing both academic research and healthcare policy.

In addition to his academic achievements, Dr. Hripcsak has served on advisory boards for organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), where his expertise has been central to U.S. strategies for health IT adoption and interoperability.

Dr. Hripcsak has received numerous awards, including recognition as an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. His work emphasizes the importance of leveraging health data at scale, not only for improving individual patient care but also for advancing global population health and ensuring that data-driven insights are reproducible, transparent, and clinically meaningful.