In the fall of 1968, during his senior year in at the Taft School in Watertown Connecticut, Safran's trajectory toward a career in biomedical informatics took an unexpected turn.
The woodworking shop at his school was transformed into a computer room, and John Kemeny, co-developer of the BASIC programming language, inaugurated the new PDP8/S.
Warner V. Slack and Howard L. Bleich, where he contributed to the institution's clinical computing systems, medical informatics education and research programs.
[7] In 2004, Safran was elected president of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and promoted a national health information infrastructure, collaborating with government entities and commercial partners to develop healthcare architectures and technology solutions.
His work with the CDC has integrated informatics into the national public health infrastructure, advancing the interoperability and effectiveness of healthcare systems.
He was the Scientific Program Committee Chair of MedInfo 98, which was the 9th World Congress on Medical Informatics held in Seoul, South Korea, from August 14-21, 1998.