Kensaku Kawamoto serves as the Dr. Helmuth F. Orthner Endowed Professor and vice chair for clinical AI and informatics for the University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics. He also serves as Chief Health AI Transformation Officer for University of Utah Health. Kawamoto directs University of Utah Health’s Innovation Laboratory, which leverages AI to advance the clinical, research and education missions of the healthcare enterprise. Kawamoto is also co-senior director of the University of Utah Digital Health Initiative.

Beyond the University of Utah, Kawamoto is a long-standing leader in health IT interoperability. He has served for nearly two decades as co-chair of the Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Work Group of Health Level Seven International, the premier standards development organization for health IT globally. He also helped lead federal public-private initiatives sponsored by the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to harmonize and validate CDS and electronic clinical quality measurement interoperability standards, directly informing how healthcare quality is measured and incentivized nationwide.

Kawamoto also founded and directs OpenCDS, a standards-based, open-source CDS initiative whose software is used in all 50 states and by over 40,000 healthcare facilities. He also founded and directs the ReImagine EHR initiative, which has leveraged over $60 million in external funding to develop, evaluate and disseminate interoperable digital health innovations integrated with the electronic health record (EHR) and implemented across diverse clinical care settings.

Beyond systems and standards, Dr. Kawamoto’s scholarship has shaped professional practice through highly influential, widely cited evidence. His seminal work on CDS success factors has been cited over 3,000 times, fundamentally informing how CDS is leveraged to improve health and health care.