Blackford Middleton is Chief Informatics & Innovation Officer at Apervita, Inc., which provides a platform for the democratization of healthcare data and payor and provider analytics to more than 2000 US hospitals. Previously, he was a professor of Biomedical Informatics, and or of Medicine, at Stanford, Harvard, and Vanderbilt Universities, and he held executive roles at Stanford (CMIO), MedicaLogic/ Medscape (CMO), Partners Healthcare System (Director, Clinical Informatics R&D), and at Vanderbilt (CIO).  Dr. Middleton’s work is focused on clinical informatics – the applied science surrounding strategy, design, implementation, and evaluation of clinical information systems in complex environments. Currently, he serves as the Chair of the Steering Committee for the Patient-centered CDS Learning Network and is a member of the Steering Committee for the MBCK (Mobilizing Biomedical Computable Knowledge) movement, and Co-Chairs the Policy and Trust Subcommittee. He has been PI on numerous clinical informatics R&D projects focusing on clinical decision support, knowledge engineering and management, and value-based technology assessment. He is Past-Chair of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), of the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), and of the Computer-based Patient Record Institute. He received his MD from SUNY-Buffalo, and MPH (epi) from Yale, and completed Fellowship in general internal medicine and an MSc in Health Services Research from Stanford focusing on clinical informatics.