Simon Cohn, MD

Simon P. Cohn, MD, MPH, is the National Director for Health Information Policy for Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Cohn earned both his BA and MPH degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and his medical degree from the University of California, Davis. He completed his postgraduate medical training at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco. He is board certified in Emergency Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Cohn maintains an active clinical practice. Dr. Cohn's medical informatics interests began in 1984, when he developed widely used computer-assisted medical charting applications using the Apple Macintosh computer for ambulatory and Emergency Department settings in Northern California Kaiser Permanente. He holds two copyrights for these software applications. In 1991 he was named Clinical Information System Coordinator for Kaiser Permanente. In this role he worked with other KP leaders to develop and implement the first national KP Clinical Information Systems Strategy. From 1997-98 he was the National Director for Data Warehousing for KP. Since 1999, he has devoted his energies at KP to health information policy and issues related to encounter data capture. Dr. Cohn was co-investigator on a federally sponsored demonstration project for clinical terminologies. He has published on this topic. In 2002, he was a recipient of a President's Award from AMIA for his contributions to the field. Dr. Cohn serves on many national boards and committees concerned with health information policy issues. He is a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS), the main public advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on health information policy and HIPAA. He chairs its Subcommittee on Standards and Security. Under his chairmanship, the subcommittee, in addition to its central role in HIPAA implementation, has developed a series of national recommendations on standards for patient medical record information. Additionally, he is a member of the AMA CPT Editorial Panel and the National Uniform Claims Committee (NUCC). He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine's Committee on Patient Safety Data Standards. Previously Dr. Cohn served as a board member of the Workgroup on Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) and Executive Committee member of the Computer-based Patient Record Institute (CPRI). He has now been elected to membership in the American College of Medical Informatics.