Don Detmer, M.D., M.A., FACS

Don Eugene Detmer is Professor of Medical Education, Vice-President for Health Sciences Emeritus, and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has held past professorships at Cambridge University, the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and visiting professor at University College London. Don served as the Vice President for Health Sciences at the Universities of Virginia and Utah and was an active vascular surgeon for thirty years. He was President and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association from 2004 to 2009 and Medical Director of Health Policy for the American College of Surgeons from 2011-2013. He has received the Walsh McDermott Award from the National Academy of Medicine (then IOM), the Morris Collen Medal from the American College of Medical Informatics, the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis’ Who’s Who as well as being named an ACMI Distinguished Fellow.

He is past chair of the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine, the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, the Board of Health Care Services of the IOM, and Blue Ridge Academic Health Group which he founded. He chaired the Computer-based Patient Record Report of the U.S. Institute of Medicine in 1991 and was on the IOM Committee that authored the “To Err is Human” and “Crossing the Quality Chasm” Reports. He was deeply engaged in early days of the national health information infrastructures of the U.S., England, and Hong Kong and helped improve policy for direct electronic communications of health records with patients in the U.S. and Europe.

According to Google Scholar, his publications have been cited over 11,000 times with an i10-index of 96. He is a Fellow of a number of professional organizations including the AAAS, the American Colleges of Medical Informatics, Surgery, Sports Medicine, and Sigma Xi, plus holding honorary Fellowships in the American Academy of Nursing and the American Academy of Physician Assistants.

Don is a graduate of the Kansas University School of Medicine & did post-graduate training at Johns Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, Duke Medical Center and Harvard Business School. His Master of Arts degree is from Cambridge University where he was the Gillings Professor of Health Care Management at its business school from 1999-2004. Recently, he served as Vice-President of the North American Truffle Growers Association. Currently, he on the boards of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the American College of Medical Informatics. He lives on his working farm in Brown’s Cove outside Charlottesville.

His most recent activity is helping to design and achieve the 25×5 goal who aim is to dramatically reduce clinician documentation time when using electronic health records (see Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics 25×5 initiative – 25 By 5: Columbia Leads Symposium, Ongoing Efforts to Reduce Documentation Burden on U.S. Clinicians – Columbia DBMI) (Updated 9/13/21)