Taha Kass-Hout serves as chief health informatics officer at the Food and Drug Administration and is the first person to hold that title in the agency’s history.
He leads the development and implementation of information systems that support the missions of the directorates, centers, physicians and scientists at the FDA and acts as a subject matter expert on scientific computing and data systems.
Additionally, Kass-Hout serves as the chair of the scientific and research domain steering committee across the Department of Health and Human Services, which credits him for launching the first HHS program hosted completely in the Internet cloud.
Prior to his role as CHIO, he served at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2013 in roles such as co-chair of CDC’s information resources governance council and director for the division of informatics solutions and operations.
In 2012, Kass-Hout co-chaired the Office of Science and Technology Policy‘s biosurveillance sub-committee, which handled work in “detecting disease and threat aberrations from the norm.â€
During the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009-2010, Kass-Hout led CDC’s quick scale-up of monitoring hospital emergency department visits in coordination with state and local public health agencies in order to cover more than 90 percent of the U.S. population.
Kass-Hout holds a Doctor of Medicine and a Master of Science in Biostatistics from the University of Texas’ Health Science Center at Houston.
He also had clinical training at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.