Dr. Overhage is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and Investigator at the Regenstrief Institute. He continues to maintain a general internal medicine practice and teaches housestaff and students at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Dr. Overhage received his BA, with High Honors, in Physics from Wabash College and his PhD in Biophysics and MD from Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Overhage was a resident in internal medicine, a medical informatics and health services research fellow and then Chief Medical Resident at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Dr. Overhage has over 20 years of computing experience including developing large scale, real‑time data acquisition and control systems and one of the earliest commercial object oriented database systems.
While he has broad interests in the use of informational interventions to modify physician behavior, development of rule-based systems to implement guidelines or protocols has been a major focus of Dr. Overhage's research for the last 15 years. Using these tools, he has completed a number of large-scale studies of implementing guidelines in the outpatient and inpatient settings that examine the impact of process measures, costs and patient outcomes. His current efforts in this area include developing and testing hand-held point of care computing devices to deliver decision support and information to providers at the point of care.
The other major research area has been implementation of a regional electronic patient record system for central Indiana. Working with Dr. Clement McDonald, one of the pioneers of medical informatics, they have created an electronic patient record containing data from many sources including laboratories, pharmacies, and hospitals in the city, accessed by emergency room and primary care providers. The system currently connects 13 major medical surgical hospitals in central Indiana and includes inpatient and outpatient encounter data, laboratory results, immunization data and other selected data. He has also been working nationally to develop policy and legislation to foster clinical data exhange.
Dr. Overhage is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and he received the Davies Recognition Award for Excellence in Computer-Based Patient Recognition for the Regenstrief Medical Record System.