Ira Hofer, MD

Ira S. Hofer, MD is a practicing anesthesiologist and clinical informaticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Hofer has been working in the field of big data analytics and electronic health record (EHR) data for over 15 years. He was the founding Director of the Division of Bioinformatics for the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine where he established a group responsible for both departmental analytics as well as all analytics for UCLA Health Operative Services and the Emergency Department. Under his leadership, the group successfully improved OR operations and efficiency and implemented innovative automated preoperative patients screening using EHR data.

Dr. Hofer’s research interests involve leveraging the data from the EHR to understand, quantify and ultimately mitigate risk in the perioperative period. His work includes some of the first papers to apply machine learning techniques for perioperative outcome prediction and has been featured on the cover of both Anesthesiology and Anesthesia&Analgesia.  Ira has a K01 from the National Heart Lung and Blood institute and serves as an associate editor for Anesthesia & Analgesia. His current research focus is on creating featurization techniques to incorporate a wide range of EHR data into machine learning models in order to improve discrimination and calibration as well as establishing multi-center perioperative collaboratives to better share raw and processed EHR data.