COLUMBIA, S.C. (November 18, 2016) – Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) has named Stephane Meystre, MD, PhD, FACMI, as the interim chief technology officer of the statewide research collaborative. Meystre is also the SmartState® Endowed Chair and founding director of the Translational Biomedical Informatics Center at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), an HSSC member organization.
Meystre, who is also an associate professor in the MUSC Psychiatry Department, is both a physician and expert in biomedical informatics, with a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP combines the disciplines of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics to enable computers to derive meaning from human or natural language input. Meystre has developed and evaluated NLP systems for clinical practice and research, and led projects applying NLP to clinical text for automatic text de-identification and clinical information extraction.
HSSC Interim CEO Jay Moskowitz said Meystre’s expertise in NLP will expand the functionality and value of HSSC’s Clinical Data Warehouse, a core health informatics research and clinical improvement tool that contains the health data of some four million South Carolinians.
“No state in the country has a near real time database of the health of its citizens like that of South Carolina; it is a powerful tool to improve public health and advance research into any number of health conditions,” Moskowitz said. “The wealth of data is also a challenge, which is why we selected Dr. Meystre as HSSC’s interim chief technology officer. He will be leading efforts to harness and truly accelerate the use of the data within the Clinical Data Warehouse using Natural Language Processing, a field of study that is the forefront of medical informatics.”
Commenting on his HSSC and MUSC appointments, Meystre said, “I am pleased to join a great team in biomedical informatics that is doing ground-breaking work in the dynamic field of NLP in both clinical and research areas. This, in turn, will help clinicians and researchers to more rapidly identify significant data and patterns within the data that could improve health and healthcare.”
Prior to joining HSSC and MUSC, Meystre was an assistant professor at the University of Utah for nearly a decade. He earned his PhD in Medical Informatics from the University of Utah, his Medical Degree from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and his Master’s of Science in Medical Informatics from the University of California, Davis. He serves as chair of the Natural Language Processing Working Group of the American Medical Informatics Association and is the CEO of Clinacuity, a start-up company that is developing products resulting from Meystre’s research.