Background
Kent was born in 1953, in Cardston, Alberta, Canada.
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Kent Alan Spackman
Edit ProfileEducation
M.D. 1979, University of Alberta, Edmonton
Ph.D. (Computer Science), 1988, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Board Certified in Clinical Pathology, 1987, American Board of Pathology
Special Qualification in Blood Banking and Transfusion Medicine, 1995, American Board of Pathology
Achievements
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Dr. Kent Spackman led the medical and scientific development of SNOMED, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, from 1997 to 2014. Doctor Roger Côté began the seminal work to develop SNOMED in 1973, and upon Dr. Côté's retirement in 1998, Kent was appointed to succeed him as Chair of the SNOMED Editorial Board of the College of American Pathologists (CAP). He was Scientific Director of SNOMED International for CAP from 1997 until 2007. He was a director of the development team for SNOMED RT, which was published in 2000, and led activities for the merger of SNOMED RT with the Read codes to form SNOMED CT in 2002. When the SNOMED intellectual property was transferred to the IHTSDO in 2007, Kent was appointed Chief Terminologist and served in that capacity from 2007 through 2014.
During that time, in addition to responsibilities for editorial and content development, Kent led harmonization activities on behalf of the IHTSDO with LOINC and the International Classification of Disease.
Kent's list of scientific accomplishments and publications is long and diverse, beginning in 1983 with his publications on machine learning but including work on terminology, ontologies, expert systems, and decision support.
Those who nominated Kent for IHTSDO's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 (a group of 7 colleagues from five different countries) attested to his patience, respect for the opinions of others, kindness and willingness to mentor and teach. The nomination praised the depth and breadth of his work to foster medical informatics and to further the development and deployment of clinical ontologies - including his pivotal role in the genesis of a formal logic model for SNOMED CT.
Career
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1986 - 1989
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1989 - 2007
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2007 - 2014
Awards
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Lifetime Achievement
International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), 2015 On 28th October 2015, during the IHTSDO Awards Dinner at the Sofitel Hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, IHTSDO honored Dr. Kent Spackman with IHTSDO's Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals for sustained, outstanding contributions in the development or promotion of SNOMED CT and for global leadership in the terminology field.International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), 2015
On 28th October 2015, during the IHTSDO Awards Dinner at the Sofitel Hotel in Montevideo, Uruguay, IHTSDO honored Dr. Kent Spackman with IHTSDO's Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals for sustained, outstanding contributions in the development or promotion of SNOMED CT and for global leadership in the terminology field.