Douglas Bell

Douglas Bell is a Professor-in-Residence in both Medicine and Computational Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). With a career spanning over 35 years, he is a leading figure in biomedical informatics, focusing on clinical data quality, patient record linkage, and machine learning applications in healthcare.

• Education:
  • B.A. in Biochemistry and Computer Science, Case Western Reserve University (1985)
  • M.D., Harvard Medical School (1990)
  • Medical Informatics Fellowship, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology (1994)
  • Ph.D. in Health Services, UCLA (2000)

His research explores data warehousing, privacy-preserving record linkage, and machine learning in medical diagnosis. He leads UCLA's participation in the National COVID Cohort Collaboration (N3C) and 4CE Consortium, analyzing global EHR data for pandemic response. Recent work includes developing simulation models for chronic kidney disease prediction and improving race-ethnicity data completeness in health records.

Key areas in his work include:

• International EHR data harmonization
• Reducing alert fatigue in clinical decision support
• Precision phenotyping for research cohorts
• Mentoring clinical informatics fellows
• Addressing health disparities in diabetes care

Scientific honors include:

• Best Poster Award, AMIA (2016)
• ACMI Fellowship (2007)
• HHMI/NIH Research Scholar (1988)
• Phi Beta Kappa (1984)

He has trained over 100 clinical informatics fellows and currently serves as Leader of the Informatics Program at UCLA CTSI, advancing biomedical discovery through data science innovation.