Mark Musen, MD, PhD, is Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University, where he is Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. In this talk, Dr. Musen will discuss how formal modeling of ontologies has supported diverse projects, from offering clinical decision support for chronic disease to ensuring that biomedical research data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The functionality offered by such systems is essential for building learning health systems at scale.

Work in biomedical informatics—whether it is intended to offer clinical decision support, to infer new knowledge from electronic health records, or to aid biomedical discovery—requires computational systems that encode models of the application areas in which they operate. Often, those models are implicit in the computer code that programmers develop. When those models can be made explicit—and editable—the models not only make our information technology more scalable and adaptable, but also they enable developers to document their assumptions about the domain and to reuse the models to create new technologies. In this talk, Dr. Musen will discuss how formal modeling of ontologies has supported diverse projects, from offering clinical decision support for chronic disease to ensuring that biomedical research data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. The functionality offered by such systems is essential for building learning health systems at scale.