Jonathan Wald elected president of Society for Participatory Medicine

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – Jonathan Wald, MD, director of patient-centered technologies at RTI International's Center for the Advancement of Health Information Technology, has been elected president of the Society for Participatory Medicine starting in October 2015.

The Society for Participatory Medicine (SPM) is a not-for-profit organization with the primary goal of promoting the participatory medicine movement, which encourages patients to become active participants in their own health. The collaborative effort endorsed by the society involves a patient-provider relationship in which patients are viewed and valued as full partners in their healthcare.

Wald will serve on the SPM's executive council for three years as president-elect, president and past president. In his work at RTI and as a member of the SPM, he has been involved both personally and professionally in the promotion of participatory medicine for a number of years.

At RTI, Wald specializes in medical informatics and personal health IT. He serves as lead investigator for research grants and contracts studying the quality and efficacy of IT in clinical practice, and examining policies for patient-generated health data and personalized health care.

His clinical systems and research aims to determine how advanced information technology and electronic communications can be used to improve clinical outcomes, processes of care, decision making, and patient care experience. Wald also serves on the Health Information Management Systems Society Connected Patient Committee and speaks locally and nationally about healthcare engagement, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Prior to joining RTI, Wald served for 10 years as the associate director of Clinical Informatics Research and Development, Partners Healthcare, Boston. In that role, he led the development of an innovative Partners-wide patient portal from inception to implementation. The portal, Patient Gateway, connects hundreds of thousands of patients and their physicians for secure online communication and access to their own patient records.

Wald has a doctorate of medicine from Brown University School of Medicine, a master's of public health from Harvard School of Public Health, and a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College.