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

Don Eugene Detmer is Professor of Medical Education, Senior Vice-President Emeritus, and University Professor of Health Policy Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He has held other professorships at Cambridge University, the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and as a 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. While at Wisconsin, he was elected President of the Medical Board, was a Badger team physician for ten years, and founded the Administrative Medicine Master’s Degree Program. He taught its capstone course, Health & Human Values, and was awarded a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1972-3, he was a Global Community Health policy fellow at the Institute of Medicine, NAS.

Don 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 (IOM), the Morris Collen Medal and Distinguished Fellow Award from the American College of Medical Informatics, and the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis’ Who’s Who.

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 on 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, among many others. He was deeply engaged in the 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.

He is a Fellow or Emeritus Fellow of 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 Associates.

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. More 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 and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and is Associate Editor of Applied Clinical Informatics. He lives on his solar-powered working farm in Brown’s Cove outside Charlottesville. Don has two daughters and three grandchildren.

His recent professional activities including stimulating the AMIA 25×5 goal to dramatically reduce clinician documentation time when using electronic health records. This work continues. Also, he is revising the 2008 Blue Ridge Academic Health’s Group proposal for national health board akin to the Federal Reserve System that manages the nation’s money. He has recently formed and facilitates a group of scholars, The Shenandoah Seven, to create a robust advocacy proposal.