William Yasnoff

Dr. William Yasnoff, a well-known national leader in health informatics, is President of the non-profit Health Record Banking Alliance, which promotes community repositories of patient-controlled electronic health information. He is also Managing Partner of National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) Advisors, a consulting firm that helps communities and organizations successfully develop and deploy health information infrastructure systems and solutions, Adjunct Professor of Health Sciences Informatics at Johns Hopkins University, and Associate Editor, Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI). Previously, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he established the NHII as a widely recognized national goal by initiating and organizing the activities resulting in the creation of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in 2004 by Executive Order of the President. Earlier, he implemented the first successful statewide immunization registry in the U.S., then spent five years at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doing pioneering work to establish the field of public health informatics. He has authored over 350 publications and presentations, including “A secure and efficiently searchable health information architecture” (JBI, 2016), the “Health Information Infrastructure” chapter in the 4th Edition of the widely used textbook Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Healthcare and Medicine, and Personal Health Records: The Essential Missing Element in 21st Century Healthcare (HIMSS, 2009). Dr. Yasnoff also spent several years as an advisor to a venture capital firm, and is a serial entrepreneur. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science (for work in pattern recognition and image analysis) and M.D. from Northwestern, received an honorary DrPH from the University of Louisville in 2006, and was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1989.