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A visionary in biomedical informatics
This article is part of a series honoring recipients of the 2021 Mayo Clinic Distinguished Alumni Award. This award is given in recognition of exceptional contributions of Mayo Clinic Alumni to medicine, including, research, education, practice and administration. The individuals receiving the award have often been recognized nationally or internationally in their fields. These articles were originally published in Mayo Clinic Alumni Magazine and on the Mayo Clinic News Network.
Christopher Chute, M.D., is an emeritus professor of biomedical informatics and associate professor of epidemiology, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science. Dr. Chute is also a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He joined the Mayo Clinic staff in 1988.
Dr. Chute is considered a visionary in biomedical informatics. He has had an enormous impact in health care digital transformation, helping to make biomedical data science and health care artificial intelligence possible. Dr. Chute's research has attracted more than $200 million of funding and resulted in more than 400 peer-reviewed publications.
Dr. Chute founded and chaired the Mayo Clinic Division of Biomedical Informatics and built the program into an international powerhouse of informatics research and education. He has worked to ensure consistency and compatibility around clinical data to ensure interpretable analyses, or interoperability. His most impactful achievement was transforming the International Classification of Diseases at the World Health Organization into a modern data science resource for disease classification and naming. He founded the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics and was president of the American College of Medical Informatics.