Michael M. Wagner

Biography

 After completing his education (BS in biology, SUNY at Stony Brook; MD, NYU School of Medicine), Dr. Wagner practiced internal medicine from 1979 to 1988 at Baltimore City Hospital, Bellevue Hospital, and with the Hawaii Permanente Medical Group. He then moved to Pittsburgh where he received additional formal training in artificial intelligence (PhD, Intelligent Systems, University of Pittsburgh) as a postdoctoral fellow at the Section for Biomedical Informatics under Randolph Miller and Gregory Cooper. He also practiced geriatric medicine until 2002. He joined the Pitt faculty in 1994 and has been an associate professor of medicine and of intelligent systems since 2001. His research has focused on building information systems for clinicians and epidemiologists including the Benedum Electronic Medical Record (1991), CLEM (1996), a notification system (1997), the RODS system (1999), and the National Retail Data Monitor (2002). The RODS system is open-source software that is being used for public health surveillance in six states, five large cities, and one country (Taiwan). The National Retail Data Monitor collects and analyzes over-the-counter health care products for the purpose of public health surveillance, collecting daily sales data from more than 50% of the stores nationally that sell such products and making the data and analyses available in nearly real time to authorized public health users. His RODS Laboratory for real-time public health surveillance is well known and attracted a visit by President Bush in the post-9/11 era. Dr. Wagner has published in the areas of medical expert systems, data quality, and extensively in the area of real-time detection of disease outbreaks.    

Research Interest

 Methods for detecting and characterizing disease outbreaks, including the development and testing of operational biosurveillance systems.