Bill Long is a principal research scientist in the Clinical Decision Making Group. His primary focus has been in the development of programs to assist the physician in cardiology.

Through a long-term collaboration with cardiologists at New England Medical Center, he has developed a program for the diagnosis of heart disease that acts as an intellectual sounding board for the physician by presenting a differential list of hypotheses explaining the findings in terms of diseases and mechanisms, allowing the physician to see how the whole picture of the patient fits together. This program has been evaluated over the past couple years and suggests more of the diseases that the patients actually had than the physicians who entered their own cases.

Bill has also developed a program for anticipating the likely effects of therapy in cardiovascular patients and has been active in using the techniques of machine learning to develop new methods of diagnosing patients. Currently, he is working in a couple of disease domains on programs that will help patients with chronic diseases manage their diseases at home.