Jonathan C. Silverstein, MD, MS, FACS, FACMI, formerly Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Tempus and at Kanter Health Foundation, has joined the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) as of July 1, 2017 and is serving as Chief Research Informatics Officer (CRIO). As CRIO, Dr. Silverstein is responsible for coordinating the healthcare data, infrastructure, and services for DBMI and the University of Pittsburgh Health Sciences.
DBMI’s current clinical and healthcare data portfolio includes the NIH-funded Precision Medicine Initiative, a CTSA Informatics Component with a research data repository, a PCORnet informatics hub site and data repository, an informatics and data hub for the NCATS-funded Accrual of patients to Clinical Trials (ACT), an NCI funded Text Information Extraction System (TIES) Cancer Research Network (TCRN) and a CDC-NIOSH funded National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank. These programs represent DBMI’s Healthcare Data Platform and is associated with over $135M funding for current translational informatics initiatives. There are five additional data science initiatives at DBMI funded in the areas of causal discovery (BD2K), population health and global health informatics (NIGMS), translational microbiomics (NHLBI), cancer informatics for precision medicine (NCI), and deep clinical phenotyping from electronic medical records (NCI).
Additional data initiatives include the Pittsburgh Genome Research Repository (http://www.pgrr.pitt.edu/) that houses The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), the evolving development of a Pitt Data Commons to serve teaching, research and library needs for information and informatics in the greater Pittsburgh region, and the Institute for Precision Medicine (IPM), which focusses on translating biomedical research into personalized clinical care. Dr. Silverstein will also coordinate our close working relationships with investigators at Carnegie Mellon University, as exemplified by our Center for Causal Discovery (http://www.ccd.pitt.edu) and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (http://www.psc.pitt.edu). DBMI is home to an active NLM-funded Biomedical Informatics Training program that has over 30 trainees. These Data Science initiatives represent another $35M in funding, which is transforming the regional and national landscape through informatics.
As CRIO, Dr. Silverstein will make decisions for long-term support of software, service staff, and hardware/cloud computing services for the health sciences,
develop a financial support plan for chargebacks and sustained growth of the healthcare data component of the Pitt Data Commons and link it to initiatives across the campus. This includes coordinating activities the Center for Clinical Research Informatics (http://www.ccri.thevislab.com/) and the Center for Clinical Informatics (http://www.cci.thevislab.com/) that are focused on healthcare data science research activities and coordination with the new Healthcare Data Initiative launched by the Chancellor for the new School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh.
Internationally known for his expertise and funded research in the application of advanced computing architectures to biomedicine, Dr. Silverstein was Vice President and Davis Family Chair of Informatics at NorthShore University HealthSystem and served as the associate director of the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Silverstein is recognized as one of three founding scientific directors of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. He was an attending general surgeon for seven years while also serving as the lead physician informatician for enterprise EMR deployments at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Silverstein earned his medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis and his Master of Science from the Harvard School of Public Health. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Dr. Silverstein joins over 20 faculty in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, which has a current annual research budget of over $18M.
