Brian S. Alper, MD, MSPH, FAAFP, FAMIA is taking on a new role at EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) — Chief Medical Knowledge Officer. Dr. Alper has served as Editor-in-Chief of DynaMed, Medical Director of EBSCO Health, and Vice President of Innovations and Evidence-Based Medicine Development at EBSCO.
Over his career, Dr. Alper has contributed to advancements in medical knowledge services that have transformed physician decision making in healthcare.
In 1995, Dr. Alper founded DynaMed, an evidence-based clinical reference, with the mission to provide the most useful information to health care professionals at the point-of-care. Dr. Alper established systematic literature surveillance as a method to extend evidence-based medicine principles and applied to sustain continuous updating of DynaMed. In 2005, EBSCO acquired DynaMed and scaled it to employ hundreds of professionals and serve the needs of millions of physicians globally.
Over his career, Dr. Alper has contributed to advancements in medical knowledge services that have transformed physician decision making in healthcare.
Over his career, Dr. Alper has contributed to advancements in medical knowledge services that have transformed physician decision making in healthcare.
Providing functional solutions for real-world practice of evidence-based medicine with efficiency for keeping current with curated medical knowledge, EBSCO and Dr. Alper have become leaders in the evidence-based medicine community. This progress has been assisted by collaborations with leading organizations including the American College of Physicians, Guidelines International Network, and McMaster University. Dr. Alper advanced the methodology of evidence-based medicine through systems to support rapid development of high-quality guidelines with limited resources, modernized models for how to organize evidence and guidance for searches for clinical use, and defining certainty of net benefit as a focal point for what matters in healthcare decision making. Most recently Dr. Alper developed a novel method to cope with the current challenge of inconsistency across clinical practice guidelines.
After two decades of effort to build a sustainable team and system for DynaMed, Dr. Alper’s mission expanded to provide the most useful support for healthcare decision making. Conceptual support for shared decision making was advanced by finding and developing the best models for achieving scalability and sustainability for evidence-based shared decision-making support. Partnerships and development of patient decision aids have included Option Grid, HealthDecision, a series of breast cancer related decision aids translated for national use in two countries, and other systems for scaling this type of decision support.
Within EBSCO, the Chief Medical Knowledge Officer will continue to support and expand the clinical knowledge strategy with broad portfolios of health knowledge services and clinical knowledge services. Beyond EBSCO, the Chief Medical Knowledge Officer will serve international leadership roles, such as the EBMonFHIR project (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources for Evidence-Based Medicine Knowledge Assets) which is defining the standard for computable expression of evidence and statistics.
