I f an individual could be an epicenter, Paul Tang, MD, would be that person for healthcare in the United States. His day job is appropriately located in Northern California, where he serves as VP and Chief Innovation and Technology Officer for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF). Dr. Tang directs the David Druker Center for Health Systems Innovation and oversees PAMF’s electronic health record (EHR) and its integrated personal health record (PHR) system, MyHealthOnline. For more than three decades, he has also been passionately involved in shaping public policy to enhance health and U.S. healthcare. Dr. Tang is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), serving on numerous IOM and National Academy of Sciences committees that make recommendations on patient safety, health information technologies, health workforce, telemedicine, privacy, health of deployed military troops and aerospace medicine in extreme environments. He has served as board chair for several health informatics professional associations, including the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Dr. Tang is vice chair of the federal Health Information Technology Policy committee, an advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and chair of its Meaningful Use workgroup, which makes recommendations for the $30-billion HIT incentive program. He is also a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), an advisory committee to the Secretary of HHS on health information policy, and co-chairs the NCVHS Quality Subcommittee. Dr. Tang chairs the National Quality Forum’s (NQF) Health Information Technology Advisory Committee, which advises NQF on strategies to leverage EHR-derived clinical data to produce more reliable and meaningful quality measures. He also co-chairs the Quality Alliance Steering Committee’s Measurement Implementation Strategy subcommittee. Dr. Tang received his B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering at Stanford University, and his MD from the University of California, San Francisco. He is a board-certified practicing internist, and consulting associate professor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.