User:DuaneSteward
Duane Steward did his undergraduate work at Florida State University, earned his veterinary professional degree from University of Florida and entered private practice. The next 14 years were spent in clinical veterinary practice, 11 of which were as a sole proprietor of a small animal house-call practice. During the latter 5 years of this period, he simultaneously completed a Masters degree in Industrial Engineering at Florida State University/Florida Ag & Mech University College of Engineering. In 1994 his clinical practice was suspended in order to engage as a Fellow in the Harvard-MIT-New England Medical Center Research Training Program in Medical Informatics. A PhD in Computer Science was conferred in 1998 at MIT under the guidance of Peter Szolovits. Additional focus for this training came from participation informally as fellow in the Clinical Decision Making Division of New England Medical Center under Steve Pauker, et al. His research interest expressed at the masters degree level centered on the application of process simulation tools to decision making in veterinary medical practice. Doctoral research was in the area of knowledge representation regarding the individual patient's perspective on what healthiness is, the means of assessing the patient's view of healthiness and the impact patient perspective inclusion in decision making has on compliance and health care outcomes.
From 2007 until January 2013, Dr Steward served as Chief Computer Scientist for Clinical Informatics at Nemours where responsibilities included clinical informatics research (e.g., practice guidelines implementation through information technology, impact of human-animal-bond/pet-ownership on pediatric care delivery and outcomes), model-based simulation (e.g., design of the Nemours Children's Hospital and process improvement) and feedback tool development (e.g., surgical morbidity and mortality data entry and national database contribution). During this time he also sat on the Health Information Exchange Coordinating Committee advising the Florida State Agency for Health Care Administration, the research committee of the Central Florida Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) and the curriculum advisory committee for UCF's College of Medicine. As of July 1st, 2014, he was appointed Research Assistant Professor in the Center For Biomedical Informatics within the Texas A&M College of Medicine of the Health Science Center.
His perspectives on successful operations and situation awareness are spawned from clinical veterinary practice development and a variety of corporate experiences. He has provided leadership in commercial IT divisions of Gartner and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He has engineered software and architected distributed enterprise technology applications in various roles including CTO of a startup in Boston before returning to the health care industry in Florida. At the other end of the spectrum, he has managed a multi-national multi-million-dollar IT harmonization project for merging companies in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr Steward has prevailed with model-based simulation to evaluate and validate numerous systems and solutions including: Orange County Health Department's Disaster Response Plan for Cities Readiness Project (CDC stockpiled medication distribution), Florida State Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory's planning for disease outbreak detection, and Nemours Children's Hospital pediatric emergency department operations. From these domains, he brings a familiarity with data domains that are characterized by lower sensitivity and specificity levels consistent with biomedical systems and inference from which accurate status determination is essential for decision support.
