As a physician John practiced in a wide variety of clinical specialties and venues, from hospital intensivist to primary care and preventive medicine, and he was a founding physician for LifeFlight Helicopter Trauma system and the Hyperbaric medicine programs at UCSD. While continuing his practice he was appointed Chief Health Information Officer for the largest Kaiser-Permanente region, SCAL. He assembled one of the best clinical informatics and integrated clinical operations teams completed KP’s digital transformation project a year ahead of schedule and $267M under budget. One of the critical priorities now is to reduce the burden of EHRs and the impact on physician burnout, which is where machine learning can play a powerful role. He has immersed himself in numerous technical and socio-behavioral disciplines to accelerate the usability and use of digital data resources for the advancement of health, wellness and happiness. He was founder of the XML standard for health record exchange, known as the CDA, CCD, and cCCD, served as a member of the SNOMED International board, and has contributed to standardizing data ontologies across many fields, including phenomics (EHR/PHR data), genomics, proteomics, and neurosciences (as a member of the Ontario Brain Institute Advisory Board). He is currently experimenting with various use cases where distributed ledgers can be applied to health information to support how individuals can more safely and productively participate in both their own health care and in the advancement of medical science. He is an advisory board member for the NIH funded “Ethics and Policy for Creating a Medical Information Commons” for the Precision Medicine Initiative. He has led several workgroups for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH), and he recently led a roundtable at the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on the future roles that blockchain and homomorphic encryption can play in genomics research and practice. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including co-editing the 2018 textbook on Health Information Technology, and has received various awards for contributions across many intersections of healthcare, health IT, informatics and policy. His professional passion is the convergence, operationalization and scaling of multiple exponential technologies and he is actively engaged in a wide range of projects involving ontologies, big data and predictive analytics, NLP and machine learning, data visualization, IOT, blockchain, genomics, microbiomics, privacy, health policy, mobile health apps and wearable sensors, and virtual care/telemedicine and cybersecurity, and he serves on the California State Task force on Cybersecurity. John has mentored scores of startups in health IT internationally on a pro bono basis. One of his current passions in anticipating the unintended consequences of machine learning, and the risks associated with advanced generalized intelligence, to stimulate a broader public discussion of how to mitigate those risks and minimize the inherent biases towards social inequity and isolation.

John is currently Chief Medical Information Officer at Arsenal Capital, where he advises on growth strategies for various health and tech related companies, and is currently advising on a global collaboration to accelerate how Covid vaccines are assessed for efficacy and durability of immunity. He is an active contributor to the Digital Medicine Payment Advisory Group, which defines how health tech and AI are built into reimbursement mechanisms.