The mission of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research is to improve health and wellness through biomedical discovery and clinical care, governed by data, information, and computation.

As a collaborative team we:  

Strive to be the premier organization for the development and evaluation of computational methods for discovery and decision making in biomedicine.

Carry out this mission by promoting and fostering an environment that integrates research, training and adoption of information technology in biomedicine.

Connect clinical enterprise and basic science to enhance patient care and provide a laboratory for informatics.

Exemplify resource and data sharing for the purposes of reproducibility, open science and improving the culture of clinical care at Stanford and worldwide.

In order to handle the ever increasing amounts of data in healthcare and biomedical research, our faculty, students, and staff investigate and create novel computational, statistical, organizational, and decision-making methods. Our research advances the state of the art in semantic technology, biostatistics, and the modeling of biomedical systems to benefit clinical and translational research as well as patient care.

BMIR has a long history at Stanford.  We began in 1979 as the Medical Computer Science (MCS) group of the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL).  Work in the 1970s on computer systems such as MYCIN and other expert systems provided strong evidence that biomedical knowledge could be modeled computationally and processed to inform clinical decision making.  MCS was the unit in the School of Medicine where such work would be continued.

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