Clinical:
John has pursued a wide range of activities in health and wellness throughout his career.  Initially he practiced primary care, preventive medicine, critical care, trauma and helicopter medicine, and was one of the founders of the hyperbaric medicine program at UCSD.  He practiced for five years as an ICU Intensivist and was director of critical care, pharmacy and therapeutics, quality and utilization at various times during his tenure at Scripps, prior to continuing his clinical practice at Kaiser Permanente in 1989.

Healthcare Informatics:
He has dedicated his recent career to transforming healthcare through Health Information Technology and  health policy at both state and federal levels.

He designed and implemented his first EHR in 1984 and has designed or implemented six additional EHRs since then, and was a subject matter expert to the JASONs report on health data architecture, and an active contributor to the AMA Task Force and the AMIA task force on HealthIT.  He chairs both regional and national IT investment portfolios for Kaiser Permanente.

His team led the first and largest deployment of KP HealthConnect, the largest private health record deployment in the nation.  He continues to lead scores of innovation projects throughout Kaiser Permanente, ranging from mobile healthcare apps, social analytics and interventions, telemedicine, big data analytics, and the behavioral economics of change.  He is currently launching a project to transform how complex data sets, including genomic, microbiomics, exposomics, socialomics and phenomics, and streaming wearable sensor data (healthcare IOT) can be transformed through visualization into intuitive representations that support shared decision making and better activation of people with their own health journeys.

He has designed a topologic and heuristic strategy for managing the avalanche of data associated with pervasive sensing, the IOT, and Big Data in general.

His primary goal is to harvest the exponential growth of knowledge about health and use it to help individuals participate more directly in improving their own health and resilience and at the same time engage their communities in broader initiatives around health promotion for all members of the community.  At the individual level, he is dedicated to helping restore the healing and caring aspects of how caregivers motivate and coordinate the care of every individual they treat.  John also articipateds in the Framework For Humanity and other groups that are addressing the issues surrounding social equity in the digital era, both inside and outside of healthcare.

He summarizes his passion as “using modern technology to restore ancient wisdom”.