Chief Medical Informatics Officer
Illumination Health
Dr. Jeffrey Curtis is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Dr. Curtis received a Medical Degree (MD) and a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, OR. He subsequently completed a residency in internal medicine at Oregon Health & Science University and a fellowship in rheumatology at UAB. He completed a graduate program in Clinical Informatics at Stanford University and received his Master of Science (MS) degree in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is board certified in both rheumatology and clinical informatics.
Dr. Curtis holds the Harbert-Ball Endowed Professorship in Rheumatology and Immunology at UAB. His major research emphasis is on evaluating the safety and comparative effectiveness of medications for rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases. He also conducts both investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored clinical trials in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and spondyloarthritis (SpA), including large pragmatic trials. He is the PI of the UAB P30 Informatics Core funded by NIH (NIAMS), focused on digital health and ‘big data’ in musculoskeletal diseases. He is the lead of the UAB Data and Analytic Center (DAC), one of two Coordinating Centers for the ACR’s Rheumatology Informatics System for Effectiveness (RISE), the largest EHR-based rheumatology registry in the world. He is Director of the UAB Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics Research (PEER) Unit. He is the Co-PI of the mobile health-based, PCORI-funded Patient Powered Research Network “ArthritisPower” research registry, focused on RA, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, and Spondyloarthritis that has enrolled more than 30,000 patients. The data sources he routinely uses include national electronic health record, health plan claims (e.g. Medicare, commercial insurance), traditional registry, patient reported outcomes, mobile device, and wearable technologies; he has done numerous projects that link these disparate data sources together.
