Ross Koppel, PhD is Professor of Medical Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine, a Senior Fellow at Penn’s Center for Public Health Initiatives, and a Professor in Penn’s Sociology Department. Dr. Koppel’s articles in JAMA, JAMIA, Annals of Internal Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs are considered seminal works. He typically employs both extensive statistical analysis with ethnographic research, surveys, observations, interviews, as well as organizational and financial analyses. Dr. Koppel and his co-author Stephen Soumerai, ScD (Harvard) have also published over 14 op-eds on research design, cost-benefit analysis, and public health in major venues (eg, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe, the Health Care Blog (THCB), STAT News). His publications also center on implementation processes, workflow, vendor-provider relations, legal and ethical issues, and data visualization.
For the past 10 years, he has also worked with computer scientists and the National Security Administration on cybersecurity, especially on the protection of medical records. Dr. 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.
He was recently awarded the honor of being only 1 of 6 members of the American Medical Informatics Association to be designated as a Distinguished Fellow of the College of Medical Informatics.