Broad range of interests in medical informatics, especially decision-support systems, integrated workstations for clinicians, and web-based information dissemination. Education and training in the field are of particular concern.
During the early 1970s, Dr. Shortliffe was principal developer of the clinical expert system known as MYCIN. After a pause between 1976 and 1979 for internal medicine house-staff training at Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools (Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford University Hospital), he joined the Stanford internal medicine faculty, where he directed an active research program in biomedical informatics. He also spearheaded the formation of Stanford's degree program in biomedical informatics. He served as Principal Investigator for Stanford's SUMEX-AIM and CAMIS Computing Resources, shared research facilities that supported biomedical informatics research and training from the early 1970s until 1997. White at Stanford he also served as Chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Department of Medicine and as Associate Chair of Medicine for Primary Care. Subsequently he assumed the role of Associate Dean for Information Resources and Technology while continuing to pursue his research and educational programs in medical informatics.
On January 1, 2000 he moved to Columbia University to assume the chairmanship of the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Since his arrival, he has revitalized the department's graduate degree programs, more than doubled the size of the faculty, broadened its scope to include bioinformatics and public health informatics (as well as its foundational excellence in clinical informatics), oversaw a change in the department's name to Biomedical Informatics (from Medical Informatics), and helped to nurture the development of Columbia's role as a National Center of Excellence in Biomedical Computation (see the MAGNet Center).