Brief Bio

Ross Koppel, PhD is Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at Penn’s Center for Public Health, and an Adjunct Professor in Penn’s Sociology Department. He is also a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at SUNY@Buffalo. Dr. Koppel’s articles in JAMA, JAMIA, Annals of Internal Medicine, NEJM, and Health Affairs are considered seminal works. He typically employs both extensive statistical analysis with ethnographic research, surveys, observations, interviews, plus organizational and financial analyses. Dr. Koppel and his co-author Stephen Soumerai (Harvard) have also published over 14 op-eds on research design, cost-benefit analysis, and public health in major venues (eg, Washington Post, WSJ, New York Times, Boston Globe, THCB, STAT).

For the past 10 years, he has also worked with computer scientists and the National Security Administration on cybersecurity, especially on protection of medical records. Professor Ross Koppel’s work on health care IT focuses on patient safety, software usability, and IT’s integration with clinical workflow. His 50 years of scholarship and applied science combines his training in sociology of medicine, work, and technology with studies of human-computer interfaces. He is widely acknowledged to have altered the understanding of how computer-enhanced medical errors affect patient safety and clinician frustration. His publications also center on implementation processes, workflow, vendor-provider relations, legal and ethical issues, and data visualization. He was recently awarded the honor of being only one of six members of the American Medical Informatics Association to be designated as Distinguished Fellow of the College of Medical Informatics.