Dr. Samuel Zetumer joins the Department of Medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine as an Assistant Professor in October 2025. He was born and raised in San Diego, California, and graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in Mathematics. He then attended the University of California, San Francisco, where he obtained a medical degree and a master’s in clinical research and study design. During his time in San Francisco, he consulted for Tog and Robin Healthcare. His research focused on the creation of extract, transform, and load (ETL) algorithms to streamline clinical research. He then attended the University of Iowa for his internal medicine residency, where he served as the Chief Resident of Quality and Patient Safety after finishing his training.
Upon completion of his chief year, he became the Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO) for the Iowa City VA Healthcare System and its 11 satellite clinics. During that period, he developed algorithms to automate the detection of diagnostic errors, identify discrepancies of care, and automate the creation of data-marts for clinical research. Dr. Zetumer specializes in the creation and deployment of software to facilitate clinical research, enhance and monitor care quality, improve operational efficiency, and augment patient care directly. As the CHIO, Dr. Zetumer worked across multidisciplinary teams to upgrade clinical data servers safely, overhaul inpatient electronic medical record (EMR) functionality, translate primary research into dashboards for specialists to use during consultation, and migrated on-premise platforms to the VA’s Azure environment.
In addition to managing commercial software, he developed novel messaging applications to improve RVU capture and reduce note delinquency. These internal applications and services now interface with every major medical and administrative department in multiple VAs across the country. He continues his work on ETLs, incorporating natural language processing and artificial intelligence into ETL workflows. Outside of medicine, Dr. Zetumer enjoys travelling, cooking, and sailing with his wife.