Dr. Charles Friedman

Charles P. Friedman, Ph.D served as the Chief Scientific Officer for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As ONC’s chief scientist, he lead a group responsible for tracking and promoting innovation in health IT, for research programs to improve technology, for applications of health IT that support basic and clinical research, for evaluation of all of ONC’s programs, for programs to develop the health IT workforce, and for activities supporting global eHealth. Dr. Friedman served as Deputy National Coordinator for two years prior to assuming his new position. He was lead author of the national Health IT Strategic Plan released in June of 2008. Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Friedman was Associate Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. In this capacity, he founded the Center for Research Informatics and Information Technology, and functioned as the Institute's Chief Information Officer. Dr.Friedman first joined NIH in 2003, as a Senior Scholar at the National Library of Medicine. From 1996 to 2003, Dr. Friedman was Professor and Associate Vice Chancellor for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh where he established a health sciences-wide Center for Biomedical Informatics, a well-funded program of informatics research, and masters and doctoral degree programs in biomedical informatics. He also served as Chief Information Officer for the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences. Dr. Friedman obtained bachelors and masters degrees in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also received a PhD in education from the University of North Carolina (UNC). He wrote his first computer program in 1966. He spent over 19 years on the medical school faculty at UNC and served as Assistant Dean for Medical Education and Informatics. In 1985, he established the Laboratory for Computing and Cognition at UNC and, in 1992, started UNC's medical informatics training program. Dr. Friedman has written extensively for scientific journals, and authored a well-known textbook. He is a past president of the American College of Medical Informatics, and was the 2005 chair of the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.