Gretchen Purcell Jackson

Gretchen Purcell Jackson, MD, PhD, FACS, FAMCI, FAMIA is Vice President and Scientific Medical Officer at Intuitive Surgical and an Associate Professor of Surgery, Pediatrics, and Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. She is President and Chair of the Board of Directors for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI). Dr. Jackson is board certified in general, pediatric surgery, and clinical informatics. Her research interests are consumer health informatics and evaluation of artificial intelligence and other digital solutions for healthcare.

Dr. Gretchen Purcell Jackson is an internationally recognized informatician and accomplished clinical surgeon with over 25 years of contributions to informatics research and practice. She earned her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics at Stanford University and held informatics faculty and leadership positions at three universities during her 9 years of surgical residency and fellowship, including being the Associate Director of the Duke Informatics Training program and primary mentor to several M.S. students while she was a surgery resident. Dr. Jackson has been an informatics leader in surgery, chairing informatics committees at the American College of Surgeons, Association for Academic Surgery, and American Pediatric Surgical Association. She has served on the editorial boards of the British Medical Journal, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, and Applied Clinical Informatics, and she has chaired the Literature Selection Technical Review Committee for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

After training in pediatric surgery, Dr. Jackson focused on empowering patients and families through health information technologies. She is currently the research director of the My Health at Vanderbilt patient portal, and her work explores the use and disparities created by such technologies. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality awarded Dr. Jackson a $1.5 million grant to study of the information needs of pregnant women and their caregivers to inform the design of health information technologies. In January of 2014, Dr. Jackson joined the first class of 455 diplomates who became board certified in the new specialty of Clinical Informatics.