UCD grad tapped as interim health system chief

A leading figure in telemedicine will act as the interim chief of the UC Davis Health System, UCD Chancellor Linda Katehi announced earlier this week.

Thomas Nesbitt, who earned his medical degree from UCD, oversees the telemedicine program as associate vice chancellor for strategic technologies and alliances. Pending UC Office of the President approval, he will fill the seat of Claire Pomeroy, vice chancellor for human health sciences and dean of the School of Medicine for the past seven years.

She plans to assume the presidency of the Lasker Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit organization that supports and promotes medical research, on June 2.

In a letter to campus, Katehi announced she will co-chair a recruitment committee to seek a permanent replacement for Pomeroy, and that UCD has hired the Monterey Park-based Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates to assist with the search.

Nesbitt joined the department of family and community medicine in 1988. He is responsible for the health system’s telemedicine, distance learning and medical informatics programs.

He has served as co-director of the California Telehealth Network, which seeks to link 800 sites together in order to expand rural health care services, and as chief scientist at UCD for UC’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, a consortium of four campuses seeking to use information technology to help address social, environmental and health care issues.

Nesbitt also has served two terms on the National Advisory Committee on Rural Health and on an advisory committee to the 9/11 Commission on the communications capabilities of emergency medicine and public health care facilities.

The American Hospital Association, American Telemedicine Association and both the Cal Aggie and UC Davis School of Medicine Alumni Associations are among the organizations who have honored his work, which also includes co-authoring more than 50 journal articles and book chapters on telemedicine.

— Reach Cory Golden at cgolden@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8046. Follow him on Twitter at @cory_golden

Cory Golden

The Enterprise's higher-education and congressional reporter. http://about.me/cory_golden

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