Blackford Middleton is Chief Informatics and Innovation Officer at Apervita, Inc. Apervita provides a platform and marketplace for the execution and exchange of healthcare data and analytics.

Currently, he also serves as Chair of the Steering Committee for the Patient-centered Clinical Decision Support Learning Network (www.pcorcds-ln.org). He is past Chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), and the Computer-based Patient Record Institute (CPRI). 

From 2013-2014, he was Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and Chief Informatics Officer (CIO), and Professor of Medicine, and of Biomedical Informatics, at Vanderbilt. During this time he implemented a comprehensive organizational and process redesign to better achieve world-class software development at scale. During his tenure there, Vanderbilt was recognized as one of the “Most Wired” healthcare systems. 

Prior to joining Vanderbilt, he was Corporate Director of Clinical Informatics Research & Development (CIRD) at Partners Healthcare System, Boston, and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and a Lecturer in Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health from 2001-2013. 

Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Clinical Informatics, and Chief Medical Officer, for MedicaLogic/Medscape, a provider of electronic medical records software (Logician™), and professional and patient portals (Medscsape.com, and AboutMyHealth.com) from 1995 to 2001. Prior to that, he was Medical Director of Information Management and Technology at Stanford University Medical Center, from 1992 to 1995. 

Specialties: Clinical Informatics, clinical decision support, knowledge engineering and management, electronic health records, patient-centered computing, patient safety and quality management, healthcare IT assessment