Fewer than 700 people worldwide hold the designation of Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association. I was inducted into that group this month, and I want to say something about what it means — not as a personal milestone, but as a statement about the work.
The core premise of Sarsa is that data and technology, including artificial intelligence, are not optional additions to healthcare — they are the operating infrastructure of what health systems need to become. That belief isn’t abstract for me. It’s what led me to leave clinical medicine and spend the last decade building informatics programs, designing data systems, and working at the intersection of public health and digital infrastructure.
Being recognized by peers in this field is a signal that the work is legible. That it registers within the discipline. That matters, because the work itself is often invisible — the unglamorous middle layer between clinical care and the technology that’s supposed to support it.
I am shaped by mentors and colleagues who continue to push my thinking. And by my family, who believed in this path before there was anything to point to. They didn’t just support the decision to leave medicine for informatics. They trusted it when it was still an idea.
There is a great deal left to do. This is not a conclusion.