Bob Hoyt
Bob Hoyt MD FACP has become a well-known figure in the health informatics space due to his work in writing and publishing educational informatics materials for college students. A decade ago Dr. Hoyt decided to write and self-publish a comprehensive textbook on health informatics, Health Informatics: Practical Guide. The book was published to address a dearth of up to date and practical textbooks on Health Informatics He chose self-publication in order to publish content that was extremely current and to keep costs down for students and faculty.
The seventh edition of Health Informatics was published in July of 2018 and is available in print, PDF, Kindle, iBook, and rental versions. Textbook information is available at www.informaticseducation.org. Dr. Hoyt recently wrote an article for Open Health News titled The Story of How our Health Informatics Textbook Came into Being. In this article, he details the history of his involvement in health informatics and how that led to the writing and publication of the textbook. Textbook proceeds are donated to informatics-related educational initiatives.
Dr. Hoyt received his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia and his medical education and residency in Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. In addition to fifteen years of private practice, Dr. Hoyt served on active duty; three years in the Army and seventeen in the Navy. While on active duty in the US Navy he was heavily involved with multiple implementations of health information technology and as a result, he became the head of the Navy Medical Informatics Action Team.
Following his Health Informatics experiences in the Navy, and additional education at Stanford University, he created a Health Informatics Certificate program at the University of West Florida in 2004, where he taught for 13 years. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Associate Clinical Professor of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. He became board certified in Clinical Informatics in 2014.
Dr. Hoyt is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Education Working Group and the AMIA Leadership Circle. He is also a member of the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM) representative on the Health Informatics Accreditation Council.
Dr. Hoyt has also been involved with clinical and informatics research over the past two decades. His research has focused on the following areas:
- Health information technology: electronic health records, diabetic registries, voice recognition, patient portals, OpenNotes
- Digital family histories: mined with artificial neural networks
- Physical activity monitoring: elderly patients, jet pilots
- Resiliency: prior Vietnam-era prisoners of war, PTSD, optimism
- Data science: analytical software, collaborative data science platforms
He has published and lectured extensively in the informatics realm. He is an author on more than thirty peer-reviewed articles, numerous gray literature articles and chapters in four textbooks. As a sought-after speaker, he has delivered approximately 50 state and national presentations.
He is also a reviewer for the following medical and informatics journals: Medicine, Journal of Aging and Activity, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Biomedical Engineering, and Applied Clinical Informatics.
Currently, Dr. Hoyt is directing his attention to two areas.
The first area deals with an open source educational electronic health record (EHR) known as LibreHealth. This is detailed in an article titled Using the Open Source LibreHealth EHR for Education in Academic Settings. The goal is to make the EHR a hands-on "sandbox" for faculty and students who do not have access to an EHR. In the future, the goal will be to integrate the EHR with natural language processing, machine learning, and a FHIR server.
The second project is quite broad, to promote data science tools that will facilitate data analytics for clinical and non-clinical students, without an extensive background in either computer science or statistics. He is considering a second textbook devoted to biomedical data science exercises.
He is married to Dr. Ann Yoshihashi and they live in Pensacola, Florida. They are involved with BigBrother/Big Sister, Take Stock in Children, Sunday's Child, Impact 100, Satori Foundation, SeaStar Aquatics, and mentoring middle school students.
Contact: [email protected]