Avinash Shanbhag
Executive Director of the Office of Technology in the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT Dept. of Health and Human Services
Avinash Shanbhag serves as the Executive Director of the Office of Technology in the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT, Dept. of Health and Human Services. In this role, he advises the National Coordinator and the Deputy National Coordinator on health information technology matters, provides executive direction and control over ONC’s technology portfolio, and fosters health information innovation.
Avinash oversees coordination with federal agencies and industry stakeholders for advancing health information technology interoperability for improved health care delivery. He leads ONC’s standards coordination activities with all the health IT standards development organizations, including administration of the ONC Health IT Certification Program, the Certified Health IT Product Lists and the certification testing tools.
He has over 25 years of experience in developing enterprise software systems and managing large scale distributed software systems for healthcare industry.
Throughout his over 10-year career with ONC, Avinash has led variety of technology positions, including serving as the Deputy Director of the Office of Technology, Director of the Testing Division and the Director of the Nationwide Health Information Network. During his tenure, he led the creation of the ONC testing and utilities platform to support health IT developers and developed long term vision for nationwide health information network, and successfully transitioned the operations of the network into “eHealth Exchange”.
Prior to joining ONC, Avinash served as the Director of Core Infrastructure, at the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology, at the National Cancer Institute. He was responsible for developing and operating the distributed network and semantic services used by all the NCI funded institutions to share research data in a privacy protective manner.
Avinash started his career as a software developer and held management positions in several private companies.
Mr. Shanbhag earned a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Alberta, and a Master’s degree in Operations Research from University of Maryland. He also maintains a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Architect certificate and a certificate in Machine Learning from MIT Sloan School of Management.