Julia Adler-Milstein

About Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD

Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, is the founding chief of the UCSF Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation and one of the nation’s foremost experts at the intersection of health policy and health informatics. She has played a pivotal role in shaping the field, along with federal and state policy, through her studies of health IT adoption and impact, early efforts to harness electronic health record audit log data for research, and assessment of strategies for health AI governance.

As a principal investigator, Dr. Adler-Milstein has secured grants totaling over $40 million from a wide range of federal and foundation sponsors. She has authored hundreds of influential, peer-reviewed articles in top-tier journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Health Affairs. Her work spans health IT policy, with a specific focus on EHRs, interoperability, telemedicine, and emerging AI tools. Her insightful findings, used by researchers, health systems, and policymakers, highlight obstacles to progress and ways to overcome them. Collectively, her work has been cited over 11,000 times and is regularly featured in outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, and Politico.

Dr. Adler-Milstein has grown the Division from an idea to an internationally recognized academic unit. With faculty from myriad specialties across UCSF’s affiliated hospitals and medical centers, the Division spearheads major initiatives driving digital transformation, including artificial intelligence, diagnostic excellence, and clinician well-being. The Division serves as the academic home for UCSF’s Clinical Informatics Fellowship, along with:

• Impact Monitoring Platform for AI in Clinical Care (IMPACC): A collaboration with UCSF Health to develop a gold-standard platform to continuously evaluate and monitor AI in clinical care, ensuring tools are trustworthy, reliable, and improve patient care.
• Coordinating Center for Diagnostic Excellence (CODEX): A national coordinating center that engages the diagnostic excellence community to promote novel findings, catalyze action, and advance the field.
• Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research (CLIIR): A leading research center that conducts rigorous work to assess the impact of digital tools on patients and clinicians with a focus on insights from EHR audit log data.
• Center to Advance Digital Physician Practice Transformation (ADAPT): A leading research center that advances evidence and community building around physician practice and experiences of care delivery, with a particular focus on how interactions with technology shape patterns and perceptions of care.

Beyond UCSF, Dr. Adler-Milstein is a national leader advising multiple federal agencies, including the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the US Congress, and serving on the Board of the American Medical Informatics Association. She is an associate editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and founded the National Research Network for Audit Log Research.

Dr. Adler-Milstein earned her BA in human biology from Stanford University and her PhD in Health Policy from Harvard. In 2019, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine—one of the youngest inductees in recent history—and continues to be recognized for her research and policy contributions. She was named one of the top 10 influential women in health IT and won numerous honors, including the New Investigator Award from the American Medical Informatics Association and AcademyHealth’s Alice S. Hersh New Investigator Award.

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