Atif Zafar, MD

Dr. Atif Zafar is a board-certified internist currently in practice as a hospitalist with Indiana University Health in Indianapolis, IN. He has over 20 years of experience working with health information technology. He has specific post-doctoral training in Medical Informatics from Indiana University and the Regenstrief Institute for Healthcare, a world-leading authority on healthcare IT and medical informatics. He has served on numerous national panels and grant review study sections at the NIH and at AHRQ related to healthcare IT. He is on the review committees of several major scientific journals including the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Journal of the American Association of Family Practice, and Medical Care, the journal of the Society for General Internal Medicine.

More specifically he has been involved with numerous national and international projects related to healthcare IT. He served as a founding member of the AHRQ National Health IT Resource Center (HITRC) that was central to President Bush’s initiative to spearhead the adoption of electronic health records nationwide and was one of the principal thought leaders and information architects for the National Healthcare IT Resource Center website. He served on the Consumer Task Force of the Nationwide Health Information Network initiative (NHIN) that aims to connect local RHIOs (Regional Health Information Organizations) to a nationwide network. He also was one of the principal study section members that reviewed $120 million in funding to support NIH grants related to healthcare IT that were supported by President Bush’s healthcare IT initiative. Locally, he served on Indiana University’s Institutional Review Board for over 10 years.

He has also directly or indirectly been involved with (either as a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator) on over $25 million in grant funded healthcare IT projects while at the Regenstrief Institute. He has taught fellows, residents, and medical students about healthcare IT while an Associate Professor of Medicine at Indiana University. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 research papers and more recently a book chapter on healthcare IT. 

He is a self-taught engineer and entrepreneur, who has multiple disruptive projects ongoing. His first venture was as co-founder of Meridian Cardiovascular Systems, Inc. an early-stage startup company seeking to change the paradigm for the treatment of cardiovascular disease using novel catheter-based technologies. He subsequently co-founded bRANE Technologies, a high-tech startup doing work to combine mobile technology with high-performance computing at the edge and in embedded spaces. Pixilica is an early-stage company building tiny machines, performing a 40 billion operations a second while dissipating only 2 watts of power. 

Over his career he has raised $30 million in funding, though both grants and direct investments.