Paul Tang, MD, MS

Dr. Paul Tang is Adjunct Professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University and a practicing internist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.

Most recently, he was Vice President, Chief Health Transformation Officer at IBM Watson Health,  responsible for applying artificial intelligence technologies to improve the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. He has served in executive administration roles in health systems for over 25 years. Prior to joining Watson Health, Dr. Tang was Vice President, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), Sutter Health, directing the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation, a disruptive innovation center focused on grand challenges in health. Dr. Tang led one of the earliest implementations of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system in the country in 1996, and in 2000, PAMF was the first to implement MyChart, a patient portal. Dr. Tang has dedicated his professional career to improving the quality of health care, innovative uses of health information technology (HIT), empowering patients through HIT, and shaping public policy to enhance health and health care in the US. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and has served on numerous NAM study committees, including a patient-safety committee he chaired that published two reports: Patient Safety: A New Standard for Care, and Key Capabilities of an Electronic Health Record System. He is a member of the Health and Medicine Division committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Dr. Tang was co-chair of the federal Health Information Technology Policy committee from 2009-2017. He has served as board chair for several health informatics professional associations, including the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He has served on the boards of AMIA, National Quality Forum, AcademyHealth, Computer-based Patient Record Institute, Joint Health Information Technology Alliance, NAM Board on Health Care Services, and National eHealth Collaborative. Dr. Tang is a recipient of the Nicholas E. Davies Award for Excellence in Computer-based Patient Record System Implementation, and the AMIA Don E. Detmer Award for Health Policy Contributions in Informatics. He currently holds one patent and has 16 patents pending. He has published numerous papers in medical informatics, appearing in New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Health Affairs, Annals of Internal Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. He has delivered over 360 invited presentations (including 44 keynotes) to national and international organizations. Dr. Tang is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

He received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Stanford University and is a board-certified practicing internist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.