Public Biography
Bonnie Kaplan, Ph.D., FACMI, is a lecturer in the Division of Health Informatics in the Yale School of Public Health Department of Biostatistics, a Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Center Scholar, a Faculty Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Faculty in the Yale School of Medicine Program for Biomedical Ethics, and Faculty Affiliate of the Yale Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. She also is a Research Associate Professor (Volunteer), Department of Biomedical Informatics, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, State University of New York at Buffalo. She received her B.A. from Cornell University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is a Distinguished Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, recognized for exemplary scholarship at the intersection of informatics, ethics, and social context, and a recipient of the AMIA President’s Award.
Dr. Kaplan has edited books, authored numerous refereed and invited papers and book chapters, and presented popular tutorials and sessions at international medical informatics and information systems conferences. Her research and consulting concern ethical, legal, and social issues related to informatics, artificial intelligence, and data; user perspectives and experiences with health information technology; digital health; and ethnographic sociotechnical evaluation. Among her publications in key journals, such as JAMIA, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Applied Clinical Informatics, MISQ, and Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, are some of the most read papers, editor’s choice, and foundational writings on organizational issues, qualitative/ethnographic sociotechnical approaches, and ethical issues. Most recently, these include refereed papers and book chapters on telemedicine, personalized medicine, data, privacy and data sharing, artificial intelligence, digital health, and also sociotechnical theory.
She has been faculty for the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) People and Organizational Issues Doctoral Consortium, the National Science Foundation Consortium for the Science of Socio-technical Systems Summer Research Institute, the National Library of Medicine Informatics Course, and the Global Bioethics Initiative International Bioethics Summer School. She also has served as faculty for the Yale Information Society Project-Shalom Comparative Legal Research Institute Israel Seminar at Yale. The only non-European invited to the workshop on "Cybersecurity Challenges in Healthcare: Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects," organized by the CANVAS Consortium, an EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, at the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland, she presented a main paper on "A Socio-Technical View of Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Cyberspace." She addressed the Fall DeVos Medical Ethics Colloquy-The Power of Data and the Dilemma of Privacy. Recently, she gave a dozen invited presentations on ethical, legal, and social issues in artificial intelligence (AI) and was an invited participant in conferences on data for public health equity and innovation and on AI healthcare simulation.
Dr. Kaplan was elected twice as chair of the AMIA People and Organizational Issues Working Group and of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Working Group and served two terms as chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Organizational and Social Issues Working Group. She was part of the AMIA Vendor Contract Issues Task Force, having previously chaired the AMIA Consumer Health Informatics Task Force. She was appointed to the Scientific Program Committee for the AMIA Annual Symposium and to the program committee for the ACM Workshop on Interactive Systems in Health Care multiple times. Dr. Kaplan was a Program Chair of the conference on Relevant Theory and Informed Practice: A 20 Year Retrospective on IS Research, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.2, The Interaction of Information Systems, and she co-edited the resulting book as well as co-editing the three editions of H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Projects. She has taught undergraduate through post-doctoral and professional courses in business, medicine, nursing, and arts and sciences programs, as well as on-line graduate and certificate courses in biomedical informatics and in bioethics.
Her publication list can be found in her CV at https://ysph.yale.edu/profile/bonnie-kaplan/
October 2026
Dr. Kaplan has edited books, authored numerous refereed and invited papers and book chapters, and presented popular tutorials and sessions at international medical informatics and information systems conferences. Her research and consulting concern ethical, legal, and social issues related to informatics, artificial intelligence, and data; user perspectives and experiences with health information technology; digital health; and ethnographic sociotechnical evaluation. Among her publications in key journals, such as JAMIA, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Applied Clinical Informatics, MISQ, and Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, are some of the most read papers, editor’s choice, and foundational writings on organizational issues, qualitative/ethnographic sociotechnical approaches, and ethical issues. Most recently, these include refereed papers and book chapters on telemedicine, personalized medicine, data, privacy and data sharing, artificial intelligence, digital health, and also sociotechnical theory.
She has been faculty for the American Medical Informatics Association’s (AMIA) People and Organizational Issues Doctoral Consortium, the National Science Foundation Consortium for the Science of Socio-technical Systems Summer Research Institute, the National Library of Medicine Informatics Course, and the Global Bioethics Initiative International Bioethics Summer School. She also has served as faculty for the Yale Information Society Project-Shalom Comparative Legal Research Institute Israel Seminar at Yale. The only non-European invited to the workshop on "Cybersecurity Challenges in Healthcare: Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects," organized by the CANVAS Consortium, an EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, at the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland, she presented a main paper on "A Socio-Technical View of Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in Cyberspace." She addressed the Fall DeVos Medical Ethics Colloquy-The Power of Data and the Dilemma of Privacy. Recently, she gave a dozen invited presentations on ethical, legal, and social issues in artificial intelligence (AI) and was an invited participant in conferences on data for public health equity and innovation and on AI healthcare simulation.
Dr. Kaplan was elected twice as chair of the AMIA People and Organizational Issues Working Group and of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues Working Group and served two terms as chair of the International Medical Informatics Association Organizational and Social Issues Working Group. She was part of the AMIA Vendor Contract Issues Task Force, having previously chaired the AMIA Consumer Health Informatics Task Force. She was appointed to the Scientific Program Committee for the AMIA Annual Symposium and to the program committee for the ACM Workshop on Interactive Systems in Health Care multiple times. Dr. Kaplan was a Program Chair of the conference on Relevant Theory and Informed Practice: A 20 Year Retrospective on IS Research, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.2, The Interaction of Information Systems, and she co-edited the resulting book as well as co-editing the three editions of H.I.T. or Miss: Lessons Learned from Health Information Technology Projects. She has taught undergraduate through post-doctoral and professional courses in business, medicine, nursing, and arts and sciences programs, as well as on-line graduate and certificate courses in biomedical informatics and in bioethics.
Her publication list can be found in her CV at https://ysph.yale.edu/profile/bonnie-kaplan/
October 2026
Historic ACMI Biography
Bonnie Kaplan is a Lecturer at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics and a member of Yale University's Interdisciplinary Bioethics Project, a Senior Scientist in the Medical Information Systems Unit at Boston University, and President of Kaplan Associates. She holds an interdisciplinary bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of Chicago in the History department's program on the History of Science and Medicine. Her doctoral dissertation concerned the development of medical informatics. Dr. Kaplan's interest in medical informatics dates to high school, where she learned computer programming at Downstate Medical Center and also in a NSF program at City University of New York. After studying computer science as an undergraduate, she conducted oral history interviews as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Computer History Project. Later in her graduate studies, she was a programmer/analyst at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics and at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center. In these positions, she wrote clinical computer applications that included a patient record system for radiation oncology and, with a colleague, an order-entry and results reporting system for a pediatrics biochemistry laboratory. She served on the ASTM E31.07 (later E31.13) standards committee for automated clinical laboratory systems. Given her interest on the history and sociology of science, technology and medicine, her recent focus has been on ìevaluationî and ìpeople and organizational issues.î Dr. Kaplan was a founding member of both the People and Organizational Issues Working Group (POI WG) in AMIA and IMIA WG-13: Organizational and Social Issues. She chairs each of these working groups and edits their joint newsletter with EFMI's WG9: Human and Organizational Issues. Dr. Kaplan served on the program committee for the ACM Conference on the History of Medical Informatics at the National Library of Medicine in 1987. In 1999, she was appointed to chair AMIA's task force in consumer health informatics. She served on the Scientific Program Committee of the AMIA Spring 2000 Congress. She is on the Scientific Program Committee for the AMIA 2001 Symposium. In 2000, Dr. Kaplan received the AMIA President's Award.
Affiliations
The American College of Medical Informatics
ACMI is a college of elected Fellows from the U.S. and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics. It is the central body for a community of scholars and practitioners who are committed to advancing the informatics field.
Year Elected
2000