Elkin Receives International Honor For Informatics Work

The academy was established in 2017 by the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and serves as an honor society that recognizes expertise in biomedical and health informatics internationally.

Academy membership is one of the highest honors in the international field of biomedical and health informatics.

“There were only 11 North Americans inducted this year and only 49 inducted to date, with 145 people worldwide,” Elkin says.

“This is an important and singular honor for an informatician. I was honored and pleased to accept,” he adds.

Elkin is renowned for building biomedical common-data-infrastructure systems and protocols that have transformed research and clinical care. He has created and implemented bioinformatics standards for exchanging and storing data.

In addition, he has pioneered the development of core methods for standardizing medical record data that can link patient records to genomic, diagnostic and treatment information.

Elkin was inducted into the IASHI during its plenary meeting Aug. 25 in Lyon, France.

The IMIA is the world body for health and biomedical informatics and provides leadership and expertise to the multidisciplinary, health-focused community and to policy makers, to enable the transformation of health care in accord with the worldwide vision of improving the health of the world population.

IMIA’s vision is that there will be a worldwide systems approach for health care.

Inherent in IMIA’s role is to bring together — from a global perspective — scientists, researchers, users, vendors, developers, consultants and suppliers in an environment of cooperation and sharing.