Curtis L Cole, MD
As Cornell University’s Vice President and Chief Global Information Officer, Dr. Curtis Cole is responsible for institutional digital strategy, policy, and technology capabilities across all campuses. Dr. Cole is the Frances and John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Libraries and Information Technology and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine and Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is “Innovator in Residence” at Cornell Tech where he advises young technology companies. He practices internal medicine, supervising students at the free Weill Cornell Community Clinic.
After graduating medical school at Cornell, he completed residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine at the New York Hospital where he became a Clinical Investigator in Medical Informatics, helping implement their first Electronic Medical Record.
He joined the faculty at Weill Cornell as the first Director of Information Services and later became the Chief Medical Information Officer where he led clinical systems until his promotion to CIO in 2009 and Assistant Vice Provost in 2022. He also helped develop training programs in Healthcare Informatics. He has mentored dozens of masters’ students, medical students, as well as PhD and post-doctoral students.
His early academic work has focused on improving electronic medical records utility and usability though the application of structured vocabularies. He played a critical role in embedding the Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) interface terminology into Epic, which later spread to all major EHRs. His team at Cornell developed TruData, a multidimensional map of all results and their component characteristics which determines the display logic in the ERH and alerts, reports, and analytics through grouping and hierarchies.
As the Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Center Bioinformatics Core, Dr. Cole led Weill Cornell’s implementation of VIVO, an ontology driven semantic web service to help connect researchers. He also laid the foundation for Cornell’s ARCH system which aggregates EHR data across systems and institutions and transforms the data for simplified use by clinical researchers.
Internationally Dr. Cole has worked in Qatar, and more recently in Brazil, to improve medical education and care. In Qatar, he helped establish the first informatics team at Sidra. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Sao Paulo where he helped plan WCM-Q’s I Precision Health Innovations in Education conference.
Outside of Cornell, Dr. Cole is on the board of the Medicare Rights Center.