Much has been made of Jesse Ehrenfeld’s career of firsts. The current president of the American Medical Association, inaugurated in June, has long advocated for safe and equitable care for sexual and gender minorities, leading to an inaugural National Institutes of Health award for his research in the area. The anesthesiologist was the youngest-ever officer of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and this year became the first openly gay president of the AMA.
Adding to that list: Ehrenfeld is the first board-certified clinical informaticist to take on the AMA’s top role — bringing a set of skills that could be particularly useful as medicine reacts to the rapid evolution of technology.
“It’s clear to everybody on the planet that we are entering into an AI era, and digital technologies offer so much potential to transform health care — not just for how physicians practice, but for how our patients experience it,” said Ehrenfeld. And as an informaticist, he said, he has “a deeper understanding of some of the foundational technologies that a lot of these platforms are built on.”
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