Stephen L. Jones, MD, MSHI

Stephen L. Jones, M.D., M.S.H.I. is a medical informaticist dedicated to raising the standard of care for all patients worldwide. He joined the Department of Surgery and The Houston Methodist Research Institute in July of 2007 after spending the prior 7 years in the medical software industry. While in industry, he held many management roles including co-founder and president of a start-up company. He later served as the clinical systems architect for a  practice management and electronic health records company. He has many years of experience designing effective software information systems and managing distributed support and development teams. Software designed, written and developed by teams managed by Dr. Jones is currently responsible for safely and efficiently ePrescribing over 100K prescriptions per month across the nation. He graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Medical School in 1995 and entered an internal medicine residency program at his home institution. It was during this time that he was first exposed to the field of medical informatics and found his true calling in medicine: clinical informatics and decision support leveraging technology to improve health and raise the standard of care. Since joining the Department of Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital in 2007 he has completed a Master of Science in Health Informatics at The University of Texas School of Biomedical Sciences and completed a post-doctoral fellowship sponsored by the NLM and administered through the Gulf Coast Consortia and the Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience training  at Rice University (NLM Grant No. 5T15LM007093). The NLM fellowship provided invaluable training for working within interdisciplinary teams and multi-institutional projects. His fellowship project was to architect an innovative semi-automated early sepsis screening system, created by Dr. Laura J. Moore and Dr. Fred A. Moore in the Division of Acute and Critical Care Surgery at HMH, to identify patients at risk for developing sepsis while they are hospitalized. The fellowship project tool and research are a central part of an initiative that has saved over 900 lives during the past 7 years at Houston Methodist Hospital and is an integral part of the Sepsis Early Recognition and Response Initiative (SERRI) funded by the CMS Health Care Innovations Challenge (CMS-1C1-12-0001) for $14.3M over a 4 year period. Dr. Jones currently serves as the Chief Clinical Informatics Officer for the Department of Surgery at Houston Methodist Hospital and Division Chief of Health Informatics – Center for Outcomes Research, Houston Methodist Research Institute. He is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Informatics in Surgery, Weill Cornell Medical College. Since 2007 he has co-authored over a dozen peer reviewed papers, one of which has been cited by the Committee on Patient Safety and Health Information Technology; Institute of Medicine, Health IT and Patient Safety: Building Safer Systems for Better Care. Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2011.

Dr. Jones' research centers on the development of customized clinical informatics systems and databases for clinical practice and research.