BETHESDA, Md. -- The American College of Medical Informatics announces W. Ed Hammond, MD as the recipient for the 2003 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence. The award will be formally presented at the Opening Session of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association on Sunday, November 9, 2003 in Washington, DC. The Morris F. Collen Award is the premier award in the field of medical informatics and has been presented each year since 1993 to an individual who has shown leadership and made significant contributions to medical informatics. Dr. Hammond has done seminal work in the field of medical informatics, has served on many key national commissions, and has held the positions of chair and president of the most visible organizations in medical informatics. Dr. Hammond's formal training is in electrical engineering and his early research involved power converters and decoding systems for spacecraft. He was a member of the founding faculty of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University in 1968. Dr. Hammond has worked on electronic medical records and in other areas of medical informatics ever since, and became an internationally renowned expert in standards for information technology in health care. He is currently President of the American Medical Informatics Association. Dr. Hammond recently served as Chair of the Data Standards Working Group of the Connecting for Health Public-Private Consortium and serves on the Board of the eHealth Initiative. He is also currently a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Patient Safety Data Standards, and has twice served as Chair of the health care standards organization HL7. Dr. Hammond is currently Professor-emeritus in Community and Family Medicine and in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. Dr. Randolph Miller, President of ACMI, stated that, "Ed Hammond, in addition to being a highly accomplished individual and a clearly deserving recipient of the Collen Award, is one of the most engaging people in our field. His discussions are always lively, his dedication to medical informatics and to AMIA is boundless, and his enthusiasm is contagious. He is an all-around credit to our profession." The American Medical Informatics Association is a nonprofit membership organization of individuals, institutions, and corporations dedicated to developing and using information technologies to improve health care. Its members are thought leaders, innovators, and policy makers in all areas of medical informatics and health information technology. Its Annual Symposium is the most comprehensive of its type in the world and is in its 27th consecutive year of meeting. For more information about this award, Dr. Hammond, ACMI, and AMIA, see the AMIA Web site at: http://www.amia.org/meetings/annual/current/main.html