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Public Biography
Dr. Les Folio is Senior Member in Diagnostic Imaging & Interventional Radiology at Moffitt Cancer Center, and a Senior Member in the Department of Machine Learning at Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute. He is also a Professor in the Department of Oncologic Sciences at the University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine.

Dr Folio has over 30 years of informatics experience: currently he is on the board of directors of the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), also on the Journal of Imaging Informatics of Medicine (JIIM) editorial board and board liaison on the SIIM hackathon committee where he was prior co-chair of the hackathon committee.

He was the lead CT radiologist at the NIH Clinical center where he pioneered interactive multimedia reporting in Feb 2015 through a corporate research agreement and published its first clinical use in AJR in Sept 2015 and an update in Radiographics in March 2018.

Les also co-chaired the HIMSS SIIM interactive multimedia reporting for several years including David Kwan and Seth Berkowicitz resulting in two published white papers and an IHE profile on IMR.

Before that retired from the military as a colonel where he pioneered the Air Force telehealth program while stationed at the pentagon in 2003. He led IT teams into harms way in 2005, establishing secure connectivity in combat support hospitals allowing teleradiology to eventually negate the need for radiologists to deploy to the front lines.

Other landmark accomplishments in the military included some of the following:

He led the first teleradiology in Korea in 1994 as one of the first digital radiology departments in the world, transmitting x-rays, computed tomography and ultrasound exams from remote bases in Korea to the 121st Army Medical Center in Seoul and eventually Alaska and Hawaii.

Dr. Folio’s innovation spirit led to one of the first applications of voice recognition for radiology reporting in Germany in 1991.

Dr. Folio pioneered telehealth in Alaska in the 1980’s by transmitting x-rays of an injured Inuit in a very remote small clinic bordering the Arctic Ocean. Since all the clinic had was a dental x-ray machine, he configured it to take an coned in x-ray of his thumb that showed a fracture dislocation requiring surgery, only available over 600 miles away in Anchorage Native Medical Center. The orthopedic surgeons agreed with Dr. Folio’s assessment and thereby gave the authorization to fly the patient to Barrow AK (the very northern tip of AK) to transfer to Anchorage, saving the Inuit’s hand. Currently, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s (ANTHC) Telehealth program allows health care professionals located at the Alaska Native Medical Center (ANMC) in Anchorage to see and treat patients in Alaska’s rural communities.

Affiliations

AMIA Certified Health Informatics Professional (ACHIP) Diplomates

AMIA Certified Health Informatics Professional (ACHIP)

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