Dr. Gesteland is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. Dr. Gesteland completed his medical school training at the University of Utah in 1996 and his combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency training at the University of Minnesota in 2000. He completed his medical informatics training at the University of Utah as a Fellow in The National Library of Medicine’s University-based Medical Informatics Training Program in 2002.
The subject of Dr. Gesteland’s Master’s of Science dissertation work was the rapid deployment and evaluation of a real-time disease outbreak detection system for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. As a fellow of Intermountain Healthcare’s Institute of Healthcare Delivery Research and later as a member of the inaugural class of Pediatric Clinical and Translational Research Scholars in the Department of Pediatrics, he built upon his thesis work to create a novel infectious disease situational awareness program for state of Utah. The program, called GermWatch, has become an invaluable resource for public health, caregivers, hospital administrators, researchers and the communities of Utah.
Dr. Gesteland has a breadth of clinical experience including 20 years of adult and pediatric urgent care and 16 years of pediatric hospital medicine. He is a practicing clinician working as an academic Hospitalist at Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children's Hospital since 2004, where he cares for a wide variety of acuity and complexity, from healthy infants with fever to children with multiple complex chronic conditions who have recently had major surgery.
Dr. Gesteland’s research interests and expertise encompasses clinical information systems, health information technology, natural language processing, machine-learning, biosurveillance, health services research and clinical decision support. He has over 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals relating to these topics. His current research focus is in furthering the development and deployment of probabilistic and interoperable methods for disease surveillance, forecasting, mitigation and response.
Dr. Gesteland has been the Principle Investigator or Co-Investigator on grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, the University of Utah’s Center for Translational Science, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Library of Medicine.
