Officially the Clinical and Research Informatics Division of the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) is a medical and bioinformatics research and development group.

Founded in 1964, the LCS provides clinical and research information systems support to the hospital and conducts active research into the application of computer technology to medical record systems, physician workstations, clinical problem solving, expert systems in medical diagnosis, knowledge management, and clinical research. In the last decade, the LCS has also formed a variety of productive relationships with industry.

The laboratory is active in medical education and provides a variety of programs for use by students of Harvard Medical School in their coursework and clinical rotations. The LCS also hosts a postdoctoral training program in medical informatics that is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The global vision of the laboratory is to focus its experiments and developments on enhancing the lives of the patients, clinicians, and investigators at MGH, and ultimately, around the world. This is pursued through basic and applied research to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of information management and to provide "Just In Time" (JIT) access to clinical and research knowledge. Our goal is the rapid transformation of our research into actual operational systems that have a daily impact on the clinical and administrative staff of MGH and the patients for which they care, as well as the dissemination of our work for the benefit of other health systems.