Public Biography
Bill Tierney entered IU Bloomington in 1969 as a freshman, he graduated from the IU School of Medicine in 1976 and completed his internal medicine residency at the IU Medical Center in 1979. After a one-year as Chief Medicine Research at Wishard Hospital, he joined the IU School of Medicine faculty in 1980 as an assistant professor of medicine.
Bill’s career has had five distinct chapters. For the first decade, he served as a biomedical informatics research in the Regenstrief Institute under the guidance of Clem McDonald, one of the titans who created the field and developed and implemented one of the country’s first electronic medical record systems at Wishard. Bill was responsible for getting people to use it (often by having the users meet with the developers for user-centered design of the EMR) and leading Clem’s studies of its effects on health care delivery and outcomes. All the while, Bill was practicing primary care, emergency medicine, and hospital medicine at Wishard.
Clem was a computer scientist while Bill was a clinician-scientist whose interests grew from implementing EHRs to conducting research on health systems and how enhancements, including digital health tools, could improve patient care and its outcomes. So, Bill established Regenstrief’s Health Services Research Program which he grew into the IU Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, established by Bill and IUSM’s Dean Holden in 1998. This “big C” IU center linked health services researchers at Wishard and the VA Medical Center and included investigators from multiple IU schools and departments. This consumed the second decade of Bill’s career.
The third decade of Bill’s career was divided from becoming Chief of IUSM’s Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and launching the Informatics and Research Programs in IU’s AMPATH Kenya Partnership with Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. The Division grew from 115 to 145 full-time faculty practicing, teaching, and conducting research at all three of IU’s health system partners: Wishard, the VA, and University Hospital before and after it merged with Methodist Hospital to form Clarian Health Partners, the progenitor of IU Health. The research program in Kenya grew to include nine Research Working Groups and seven Cores, each with a Kenyan and a North American AMPATH co-leader. By the end of this decade (2010), the AMPATH Research Program had garnered more than $65 million in grants and contracts, mostly from NIH, and since then has received more than $265 million in extramural funds and published more than 1500 peer-reviewed journal articles.
In the fourth chapter of his career, Bill became the President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute and the Chief of Internal Medicine for Wishard Health Services. These two positions were interdependent: Wishard (which morphed to Eskenazi Health during Bill’s tenure as Chief) was Regenstrief’s “clinical research laboratory” while Wishard relied on Regenstrief to bring in more than $300 million in extramural grant funds to conduct health services and quality improvement research.
After six years in these two roles, in 2015 Bill took a five-year sabbatical to help start the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, serving as Founding Chair of its Department of Population Health. After growing the department to include 80 faculty and 50 staff playing a key role in meeting Dell Med’s commitment to make Austin a “model healthy city,” Bill returned to IU in 2021 to join the Fairbanks School of Public Health as Associate Dean for Population Health & Health Outcomes, serving as a link between the school and IU School of Medicine, the three local health systems, Regenstrief, and community partners.
Bill has received more than $60 million in extramural grants as PI or Director and published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles that have been cited by others more than 30,000 times. In recognition of his work, Bill was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006 and has received the highest career awards from professional societies in four disciplines: the Robert Glaser Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine, the Morris Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics, the Career Achievement Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science, and the Feinstein Award for Clinical Epidemiology from the American College of Physicians. He also has named a Master by the American College of Physicians and elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the Royal College of Physicians of London.
Bill’s career has had five distinct chapters. For the first decade, he served as a biomedical informatics research in the Regenstrief Institute under the guidance of Clem McDonald, one of the titans who created the field and developed and implemented one of the country’s first electronic medical record systems at Wishard. Bill was responsible for getting people to use it (often by having the users meet with the developers for user-centered design of the EMR) and leading Clem’s studies of its effects on health care delivery and outcomes. All the while, Bill was practicing primary care, emergency medicine, and hospital medicine at Wishard.
Clem was a computer scientist while Bill was a clinician-scientist whose interests grew from implementing EHRs to conducting research on health systems and how enhancements, including digital health tools, could improve patient care and its outcomes. So, Bill established Regenstrief’s Health Services Research Program which he grew into the IU Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research, established by Bill and IUSM’s Dean Holden in 1998. This “big C” IU center linked health services researchers at Wishard and the VA Medical Center and included investigators from multiple IU schools and departments. This consumed the second decade of Bill’s career.
The third decade of Bill’s career was divided from becoming Chief of IUSM’s Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics and launching the Informatics and Research Programs in IU’s AMPATH Kenya Partnership with Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. The Division grew from 115 to 145 full-time faculty practicing, teaching, and conducting research at all three of IU’s health system partners: Wishard, the VA, and University Hospital before and after it merged with Methodist Hospital to form Clarian Health Partners, the progenitor of IU Health. The research program in Kenya grew to include nine Research Working Groups and seven Cores, each with a Kenyan and a North American AMPATH co-leader. By the end of this decade (2010), the AMPATH Research Program had garnered more than $65 million in grants and contracts, mostly from NIH, and since then has received more than $265 million in extramural funds and published more than 1500 peer-reviewed journal articles.
In the fourth chapter of his career, Bill became the President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute and the Chief of Internal Medicine for Wishard Health Services. These two positions were interdependent: Wishard (which morphed to Eskenazi Health during Bill’s tenure as Chief) was Regenstrief’s “clinical research laboratory” while Wishard relied on Regenstrief to bring in more than $300 million in extramural grant funds to conduct health services and quality improvement research.
After six years in these two roles, in 2015 Bill took a five-year sabbatical to help start the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, serving as Founding Chair of its Department of Population Health. After growing the department to include 80 faculty and 50 staff playing a key role in meeting Dell Med’s commitment to make Austin a “model healthy city,” Bill returned to IU in 2021 to join the Fairbanks School of Public Health as Associate Dean for Population Health & Health Outcomes, serving as a link between the school and IU School of Medicine, the three local health systems, Regenstrief, and community partners.
Bill has received more than $60 million in extramural grants as PI or Director and published more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles that have been cited by others more than 30,000 times. In recognition of his work, Bill was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006 and has received the highest career awards from professional societies in four disciplines: the Robert Glaser Award from the Society of General Internal Medicine, the Morris Collen Award from the American College of Medical Informatics, the Career Achievement Award from the Association for Clinical and Translational Science, and the Feinstein Award for Clinical Epidemiology from the American College of Physicians. He also has named a Master by the American College of Physicians and elected to fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics, the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, and the Royal College of Physicians of London.
Morris F. Collen Award
Historic ACMI Biography
Dr. Tierney is a general internist, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute. He received an undergraduate degree in biological sciences at Indiana University where he also received his MD degree in 1976. He served as intern and resident at the Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis and was Chief Resident in Medicine at Wishard Memorial Hospital, Indianaís only tax-supported public teaching hospital. In 1980, he joined Dr. Clem McDonald in the Regenstrief Instituteís Computer Science Research Section, for which he currently serves as Associate Director. His research focuses on the implementation and assessment of health information systems in Wishard Hospital. Specifically, he helped implement one of the first outpatient computer-based physician order-entry programs and showed that one could lower the costs of outpatient diagnostic testing by providing prior test results, probabilities of abnormal results, and costs of tests. He is currently assisting Dr. McDonald in developing and implementing this CPOE system on the inpatient medicine service of Wishard Hospital and designing and conducting a randomized, controlled trial of its effects on inpatient ordering, length of stay, costs of care, and errors. He has also performed clinical epidemiologic studies of clinical data stored in the Regenstrief Medical Record System, mainly to identify risk factors for abnormal test results. He also uses these data to identify patients in primary care who are eligible for studies. In addition to his research, Dr. Tierney also practices general internal medicine in inpatient, emergency room, and outpatient primary care venues. He was also the Director of Medical Manpower for the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis, for which he also served as Sports Medicine Officer for Track and Field. He was been elected to Fellowship in the American College of Physicians in 1987.
Affiliations
The American College of Medical Informatics
Morris F. Collen Award Winner
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
1988