Thomas A. Mason

Dr. Thomas Mason is Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As CMO he is a health IT and stakeholder ambassador for ONC, routinely meeting with clinicians in the field and advocates across the healthcare industry, focusing on improving health IT usability, reducing clinician burden, and advancing ONC’s mission to improve data use and its availability across the health care spectrum. Working closely with staff at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) and other agencies within HHS, Dr. Mason leads efforts to better understand and address clinical documentation burdens and other administrative burdens relating to the use of electronic health records. Dr. Mason led the development of ONC’s Health IT Playbook, which offers tools, resources, and best practices to help address the challenges of implementing, adopting and optimizing health IT.

Prior to joining ONC, Dr. Mason worked at the Cook Country Health and Hospitals System (CCHHS), the third largest public hospital system in the country. He spent 14 years as a board-certified internist with an emphasis on primary care and preventative medicine and led the charge to implement EHRs across the system. His work at CCHHS allowed specialists and primary care providers to streamline and optimize EHR use, improving clinical workflow and system efficiency. Dr. Mason has brought his experience implementing multiple EHRs to ONC to help the agency better understand the difficulties clinicians experience with health IT and to help facilitate collaboration between the government and the healthcare industry to improve clinicians’ and patients’ engagement with innovative health technologies.

Dr. Mason earned his M.D. from the University of Illinois College of Medicine and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Rush University Medical Center and Cook County Hospital.