WASHINGTON, DC – The American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) will present the 2025 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence to Christopher G. Chute, MD, DrPH, FACMI, on November 16 during the opening session of the AMIA 2025 Annual Symposium, November 15-19 in Atlanta.
In honor of Morris F. Collen, a thought leader in the field of medical informatics, the prestigious award is presented to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field. The award is determined by ACMI’s Awards Committee.
"It is my great honor, on behalf of the American College of Medical Informatics, to recognize Dr. Chris Chute with the Collen Award, our College’s highest distinction," said ACMI President Peter J. Embí, MD, MS, FACMI, FAMIA, FIAHSI, Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "His pioneering work in biomedical data representation, interoperability, and global data standards has transformed the field and demonstrated the indispensable role of informatics in advancing health and science. Dr. Chute embodies the vision and values of Morris F. Collen through his innovation, leadership, and service, and we are proud to recognize his extraordinary and lasting contributions."
Dr. Chute is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he is Head, Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science. He is Chief Research Information Officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine. He is professor emeritus of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic, where he founded and chaired the division for 20 years.
Dr. Chute has been active in biomedical informatics for almost 40 years, breaking new ground in terminology and knowledge representation that has gone on to have international influence. His career mirrors the evolution of the field and has been defined by a commitment to applied research, interoperability standards development, administration, service, and education.
While at the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins University, he has had a long history of personal commitment and dedication to building the field of bioinformatics. He founded the Division of Biomedical Informatics at Mayo in 1988, and the Section of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Johns Hopkins in 2021 and has decades of administrative and educational leadership there.
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Chute created a hub of EHR data reuse activity for the entire state of Maryland, making the state a population-health laboratory. He has led the Research Committee of the Maryland Chesapeake Regional Information System for Our Patients (CRISP) health information exchange in building a centralized database to help Maryland during the pandemic. He is now spurring CRISP to enable research beyond COVID. As Chief Research Information Officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine, he helped it be recognized as a leader among major EHR-based common data models.
Most impactful was his transformation of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) at the World Health Organization (WHO) from an archaic tabular artifact into a modern data science resource for disease classification and naming. He led the WHO Revision Steering Group from 2007 until 2016 to create ICD-11. During that time, he fundamentally transformed the architecture of the ICD, and the entire Family of International Classifications at WHO, into a robust, semantically grounded information resource that could serve a myriad of clinical, research, public health, and statistical use-cases.
Most recently, Dr. Chute has co-led the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), now the largest integrated collection of EHR data for research analyses of COVID-19 in the world. Within four months of the pandemic’s start, he and his co-leaders assembled the governance, created the rules of the road, and successfully solicited and harmonized electronic health record data from 84 academic health centers.
An active member of AMIA since 1989, Dr. Chute has served on six Annual Symposium program committees, served twice on the AMIA Board of Directors, and was President of ACMI. He has been a member of the JAMIA Editorial Board for decades and served on the AMIA Standards Standard publication board.
His work to promote practical information standards and practices included the development of Common Terminology Services. He successfully promoted health information technology standards, especially terminology and syntactic standards, to be freely available without intellectual property or financial encumbrances. He was among the founders of the Open Health Terminology Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation and implementation of an open health terminology in the US. This effort greatly broadened the availability of SNOMED to become part of federal policy and core to research.
Dr. Chute received an AB in English and his medical degree from Brown University; from Harvard, his MPH in Epidemiology and DrPH in Epidemiology/Biostatistics. He completed his Internal Medicine residency at Dartmouth.
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ACMI is an honorary College of elected Informatics Fellows from the United States and abroad who have made significant and sustained contributions to the field of medical informatics and who have met rigorous scholarly scrutiny by their peers. Incorporated in 1984, ACMI dissolved its separate corporate status to merge with the American Association for Medical Systems and Informatics (AAMSI) and the Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC), when AMIA was formed in 1989. The College now exists as an entity within AMIA, with its own bylaws and regulations.
AMIA’s Annual Symposium presents leading edge scientific research on biomedical and health informatics, showcasing more than 600 scientific sessions. The Symposium is the largest informatics event worldwide. The work presented spans the spectrum of the informatics field: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics and public health informatics.