Paul Tang joins IBM Watson Health
Paul Tang, MD – well known for his work at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation and with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT – has taken on the new role of Chief Health Transformation Officer at IBM Watson.
After 18 years of leading health IT innovation at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, which is part of Sutter Health in Sacramento, California,
Tang started with IBM Watson Health on April 4 and officially announced the move in a blog published May 25.
[Also: AI, cognitive computing, machine learning coming to healthcare: Best time to invest?]
Tang said the reason he made the career move is to help change the healthcare system on a larger scale – and to do it more quickly.
“It’s a different scale, and a different platform, to help do the same job I wanted to do,” Tang said. “My job was to use information tools to do a better job of improving the health of a community. Period. This has the scale and the platform to help do that in a systematized way.”
Tang has been on the provider side of healthcare for his entire career, including work as a provider, administrator, researcher, corporate research, policy for a couple of decades, and in academia.
“I’ve heard the story from a number of perspectives,” Tang explained. “That’s what I try to use in order to think and work through what would make the biggest contribution in healthcare.”
While serving as IBM Watson Health’s Chief Health Transformation Officer, Tang said he will continue to practice medicine one day a week, and still serve as co-chair of the HIT Policy Committee for ONC.
Twitter: @Bernie_HITN
Email the writer: bernie.monegain@himssmedia.com
