The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has announced its 2016 Signature Award recipients. DBMI Chair Zak Kohane has been chosen for the William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics, which he will receive during the AMIA 2016 Leadership Dinner on November 12 during the annual symposium in Chicago.

The AMIA Stead Award acknowledges people who have influenced our thinking about informatics, especially by improving health and health care at the local or national level in ways that are visionary and transformative, with ideas that are adopted beyond the recipient’s home organization. In Kohane's case this influence includes the i2b2 project, which is currently deployed internationally to over 120 major academic health centers to drive discovery research in disease and pharmacovigilance (including providing evidence on drugs which ultimately contributed to “black box”ing by the FDA), as well as several hundred papers in the medical literature and a widely-used book on Microarrays for an Integrative Genomics.

The award's namesake and inaugural recipient, Dr. William (Bill) Stead, has led the nation for decades in thinking about how biomedical informatics methods and architectures can improve health care systems. He began his career at Duke University, where he helped build one of the first patient-centered hospital information systems. He is currently Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Chief Strategy Officer, McKesson Foundation Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).

Kohane was nominated for this year's award by Drs. Nancy Lorenzi and Kevin Johnson, also of the VUMC Department of Biomedical Informatics.

Additional past Stead Award winners include W. Ed Hammond of VUMC in 2015 and John Glaser of Siemens Healthcare (later acquired by Cerner) in 2014.

Below is the full roster of 2016 Signature Awards and recipients.

• Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics
  • Burke Mamlin, MD, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, Research Investigator, Regenstrief Institute, Inc., OpenMRS Co-Founder
  • Paul Biondich, MD, MS, FACMI, Assistant Professor, Regenstrief Institute, Children’s Health Services Research
• Don Eugene Detmer Award for Health Policy Contribution in Informatics
  • Mark E. Frisse, MD, MS, MBA, FACMI, Accenture Professor and Vice Chair, Business Development, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University
• Virginia K. Saba Informatics Award
  • Patricia C. Dykes, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
• William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics
  • Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD, FACMI, Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
• New Investigator Award
  • Nicholas P. Tatonetti, PhD, Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University