Thomas Powell, MD

Thomas Powell is a physician executive, a career chief medical information officer (CMIO), and the founder of CMIO, LLC, which provides interim physician informatics leadership and advisory work to health systems. He has held the CMIO seat in academic, community, pediatric, and integrated delivery systems, and in most of them he was the first.

At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), he was CMIO and associate vice chancellor and led the move to Epic across the hospital and 43 clinical groups. At Aspirus Health, he was vice president and CMIO of an 18-hospital system with 1,300 employed physicians and advanced practice clinicians, and at Miami Children's Hospital, now Nicklaus Children's, he took 38 pediatric subspecialties from paper to Cerner. He served the State of Arkansas as medical and executive officer of the Office of Health Information Technology and the state health information exchange.

He trained at Duke University as a National Library of Medicine fellow in clinical informatics under Ed Hammond, and at UAMS he created Arkansas's first clinical informatics master's and doctoral program and helped build the state's only clinical informatics board fellowship. He writes and speaks on applied clinical informatics, the governance of clinical AI, electronic health record usability, and the physician executive role.

He is the author of The Diagnostician: American Healthcare Is Sick, Misdiagnosed, and Getting Worse; It's Time to Call the Doctor, forthcoming November 3, 2026, which applies the clinical diagnostic method to the health care organization itself. He shares updates on X.