After graduating from Brown University with a ScB degree in computers in the biomedical sciences and earning an MD degree at New York Medical College, Dr. Cimino interned and completed residency training in medicine at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York. He went on to complete a research fellowship in medical informatics sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard School of Public Health. While there, he worked on the development of the diagnostic decision support system DXplain and the NLM's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). In 1988, he joined the Center for Medical Informatics (now the Department of Biomedical Informatics) at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons where he conducted informatics research, built clinical information systems, taught informatics and medicine, and practiced general internal medicine as professor in the Department of Medicine and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital. While at Columbia, he published landmark work on controlled terminologies (including a widely adopted set of "desiderata"), the UMLS, the use of the Internet in health care, patient access to personal health records, studies of clinician information needs, and development of the "infobutton".
In 2008, he converted his Columbia appointment to adjunt professor in Biomedical Informatics and moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he is Chief of the Laboratory for Informatics Development at the Clinical Center and a senior scientist at the National Library of Medicine. He is charged with the development of an institute-wide Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS) and continues to conduct clinical informatics research. Cimino has been an active member of the NLM Board of Scientific Counselors, co-chair of the HL-7 Vocabulary Technical Committee, and on the board of the American Medical Informatics Association. He is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, the American College of Physicians, the American Clinical and Climatologic Association, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has received the Priscilla Mayden Award from the University of Utah, a President's Award from the American Medical Informatics Association and the Medal of Honor from New York Medical College.