William M. Tierney, MD

William Tierney, MD is a general internist and medical informaticist who currently serves as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., the country’s oldest research institution dedicated to improving health systems. The Regenstrief Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports the research and service missions of the Indiana University School of Medicine where Dr. Tierney is Associate Dean for Clinical Effectiveness Research and practices general internal medicine at Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis where he was Chief of Internal Medicine from 2009 to 2014.
Dr. Tierney’s research focuses on improving health care delivery and its outcomes through developing and implementing electronic health record systems (EHRs) in hospital and outpatient venues in Indiana and in East Africa. He led the only randomized, controlled trial of provider order-entry workstations, showing improvements in both cost and safety. His team of developers implemented sub-Saharan Africa’s first ambulatory EHR in 2000 which has grown and evolved into OpenMRS, the world’s most widely used open-source EHR system that’s been implemented in more than 40 countries and nationally in all Ministry of Health sites in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.
Dr. Tierney is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians. He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and Master of the American College of Physicians. He has received the highest lifetime achievement award from the nation’s leading organizations in three disciplines: academic general internal medicine (from the Society of General Internal Medicine), biomedical informatics (from the American College of Medical Informatics), and translational science (from the Society for Clinical and Translational Science). He is the former Editor-in-Chief of two medical journals: the Journal of General Internal Medicine and Medical Care. He’s received more than $30 million in grants and contracts as Principal Investigator and has published 290 peer-reviewed medical journal articles. His publications have been cited by others more than 20,000 times.