Majid Afshar, MD, MSCR

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Education

• Rush Medical College, Chicago, Illinois – MD
• Rush University Medical Center – Residency in Internal Medicine
• University of Maryland Medical Center, Baltimore, Maryland – Fellowship in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine
• Rush University – Research Methods and Epidemiology, MS

Professional Activities

Dr. Afshar is a faculty member in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine within the Department of Medicine. Additionally, he is part of the leadership team of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR), focusing on advancing Learning Health System (LHS) concepts, collaborations, and tools. He also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics and he serves as a Physician Informaticist for UW Health. He is a steering committee member of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Clinical Decision Support working group and was the Data Science Vice-Chair for the 2021 AMIA  Informatics Summit. He has served on study sections for the Department of Defense, National Institute of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He is a member of a number of professional societies, including the Critical Care Committee member for the American Thoracic Society. 

Clinical Specialties

Dr. Afshar works closely with hospital informatics to improve health outcomes and healthcare delivery. 

Research Interests

View Dr. Majid Afshar's publications on NCBI MyBibliography

Dr. Afshar co-leads the Department of Medicine Data Science Lab. Dr. Afshar’s research interests include predictive analytics (diagnostics and prognostics) using electronic health record data and public health data for individuals with critical illness and substance misuse. His focus is on early detection and monitoring using methods in natural language processing and machine learning. He has previously developed models for identifying substance misuse and respiratory failure in hospitalized patients, as well as a risk prediction model for acute respiratory distress syndrome in burn patients. He has helped multiple institutions develop large-scale NLP pipelines for big data research needs. Dr. Afshar has previously received an NIH F32 National Research Service Award and NIH K23 Career Development Award. He currently has an NIH R01 to implement and study machine learning algorithms in the health system and examine the effectiveness of NLP-driven tools on health outcomes. He also has a supplement to this R01 award to build a data ecosystem that, for the first time, will harmonize data across UW hospital, EMS/Fire, and public health domains to study substance misuse.