David E. Garets, FHIMSS. Mr. Garets is a semi-retired healthcare IT industry analyst, Principal at Change Gang, LLC and a Principal at Mountain Summit Advisors. He’s also an advisor and chair of the Executive Advisory Boards for SCI Solutions and SoftServe, Inc., as well as a Senior Advisor for Next Wave Health.

Previously, he served as General Manager and Executive Director of the Healthcare IT Suite at The Advisory Board Company, as president and President & CEO of HIMSS Analytics, Executive Vice President of HIMSS, EVP at Healthlink, Group VP at Gartner and as an experienced healthcare CIO.

Mr. Garets served as HIMSS board chair in 2004 and as President of two state HIMSS chapters, ID and WA. He sits on the governing boards of Health Care DataWorks and the PeaceHealth Northwest Network.

He was a Charter Member of CHIME and served on the faculties of the CHIME Information Management Executive courses for 11 years. He is an internationally known author and speaker on healthcare information strategies, technologies, and change management, and in 2011 was elected to the HIMSS 50-in-50, the 50 most memorable and influential contributors to healthcare IT in the last 50 years. Mr. Garets is the co-creator of the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model, the international de facto standard for measuring the progress towards a full electronic medical record. He earned a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in Marketing from Texas Tech University.