Dr. Waitman received his B.S. from Washington University in Electrical Engineering. Upon graduation, he served in the United States Air Force as a Medical Service Corps officer and received training in Health Services Administration and Clinical Engineering. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Vanderbilt University and conducted research applying neural networks and machine learning to critical care and perioperative environments.

In 2002, Dr. Waitman took a faculty position with the newly formed Department of Biomedical Informatics in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and led their Computerized Provider Order Entry project, "WizOrder". During this time, the team expanded WizOrder's advanced decision support capabilities to meet the clinical needs of the Pediatric and Neonatal ICUs, the Emergency Department, the Psychiatric Hospital, and developed applications for enterprise-wide medication reconciliation and real-time adverse drug event surveillance. He furthered Vanderbilt's commercialization initiative with McKesson Corporation by leading the effort to successfully merge the project with its commercial offspring, Horizon Expert Orders, and also oversaw deployment of other McKesson inpatient clinical systems for nurse documentation (Horizon Expert Documentation) and bar-code medication administration (AdminRx).

Since arriving at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2010, he has worked with colleagues across the schools and campuses to establish a strategy for clinical and translation research informatics for Frontiers, the Kansas and Kansas City NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award. A key component was working with the University of Kansas Physicians and the University of Kansas Hospital to establish a master data sharing agreement and oversight process so they could jointly create an integrated data repository, HERON, based on the NIH funded i2b2 platform. His research interests are clinical decision support, knowledge discovery, and creating information environments to support personal health, research and patient safety.