Dr. Paul Tang, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation’s long-time leader in all things digital, has left the building.
Tang left PAMF, a 1,400-physician Sutter Health affiliate, April 4 to take on the newly created role of chief health transformation officer at IBM Watson Health, the new cognitive health computing unit of giant IBM
IBM has made $4 billion in acquisitions and added more than 5,000 employees through those deals to augment the unit’s staff of more than 6,000, partnering with the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson. But skeptics aren’t convinced the technology is as advanced or “human-like” in its ability to take mountains of data and find actionable results with a personal flair.
IBM bought Truven Health Analytics in April for $1.4 billion.
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In a phone interview Thursday morning, Tang told me the chance to do similar work on a platform that allows for more “scale and impact” led him to leave PAMF after 18 years to take on a new challenge.
But he still lives in the Palo Alto area and will continue his medical practice at PAMF, Tang said.
Tang most recently was a PAMF vice president and chief innovation and technology officer. He held the chief medical information officer role for 12 years, through 2010.
He’d been at PAMF since 1998, directing the implementation of its first electronic medical record system, and later helping it create the MyChart patient portal in coordination with Epic Systems Corp.
Nationally, Tang is vice chair of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ health information technology policy committee and of its Meaningful Use task force. He’s also a board member or chairman of a number of other key HIT committees and advisory groups nationally.
Tang’s goal, he told me Thursday morning, is to continue to build on his work at PAMF toward creating a more “holistic” approach to health care that involves treating the whole person, and thinking of “someone as a person, not a patient” when treating them.
IBM Watson has access to “a lot of information about a lot of people,” which gives it the opportunity to use cognitive computing to see patterns, improve care and broaden understanding of patients as people, he said, and “to bring key insights to the point of care.”
Date: May 26, 2016