AMIA Board Acknowledges Ted Shortliffe's Leadership Role

The AMIA Board would like to acknowledge Ted Shortliffe for his superb service as AMIA President and CEO. Ted took over the leadership of AMIA in 2009. Having Ted at the helm has been truly a gift for AMIA. Ted brought to the role the perspectives of over 4 decades of informatics experience, much of it in leadership positions and spanning research, clinical and administrative activities. Ted was one of the founders of AMIA and he had served in many leadership roles previously at the organization. Ted had several important accomplishments during his tenure as CEO and President including: an important advancement of the corporate membership program, an advancement of the marketing and communications program, the formalization of the clinical subspecialty certification process for Clinical Informatics, and the substantial growth of the translational bioinformatics and clinical research informatics "Summits" meetings. We are saddened to be losing Ted as the leader of AMIA. We certainly wish him well in his next ventures and look forward to his continued participation in AMIA.

Excerpt of Ted Shortliffe's Nov. 3 Message to the AMIA Membership

AMIA is a unique and vibrant organization, as those of you who attended the recent Annual Symposium can attest. The staff members in the AMIA offices take great pleasure in serving the AMIA membership and in making the organization as strong and effective as it can be.

My own role with AMIA extends back to well before the organization was formed – to the days when our ancestral organizations (AAMSI and SCAMC) could not imagine what their merger in the late 1980s would create some 20 years later. I was President of SCAMC at that time, and was excited by the opportunity to work with others to bring together the fragmented elements of the informatics community into one, stronger organization. I continued for the next two decades, initially as a board member and then as an active member of AMIA, and was delighted when I was offered the chance to assume a full-time leadership role as AMIA’s President and CEO.

The last three years have been great fun and highly rewarding. We have had both ups and downs, especially given the fiscal challenges of the world economy of late, but the organization is playing a visible and effective role and has evolved to adjust to the changing times and our increasingly heterogeneous membership.

However, after much thought and discussion with the AMIA Board, I have decided that it is time for me to move on to pursue other interests, turning AMIA over to new leadership. I have informed the board of my decision and they will be initiating a search process to identity a successor who can lead the organization into its next phase. My plan is to continue in my current role, and to assist in the transition to new leadership, although I will reduce my time commitment starting in January 2012. We expect that this transition will be complete sometime during the first several months of next year.

It has been an honor and a delight to serve AMIA in this way and AMIA will always be my primary professional home. I extend my thanks to the membership for their ongoing support, and will look forward to seeing you at upcoming AMIA meetings and into the future, well after I have stepped down from my current position.

Ted Shortliffe, President and CEO