About
Dr. William Toth, MD, MS
Physician executive · Chief Medical Information Officer · Clinical informaticist
Dr. William Toth has spent twenty years at the intersection of medicine, technology, and human behavior — and his central argument has never changed: the failure in healthcare informatics is not technical. It’s cognitive. The dashboards are good. The humans using them are complex, biased, and operating in systems that actively condition them away from clinical thinking. That’s the problem worth solving.
His thought-leadership series, Data-Only Delusion: Informatics as a Behavioral Science, is built on a single premise: if we want to transform healthcare, we have to stop treating informatics as a math problem and start treating it as a psychological one. The data won’t save you. But a shared definition of what that data means just might.
Career
Twenty years in clinical informatics.
Chief Medical Information Officer
Koniag Government Services · 2024–Present
Senior clinical consultant to the Program Management Office for the Indian Health Service (IHS) Division of Health Information Technology Modernization and Operations. Provides functional advisory leadership on EHR modernization, health IT governance, change management, training, analytics, and AI integration — bringing a behavioral-science lens to one of the most complex federal health IT transformation efforts underway.
Chief of Medical Information Operations
Air Force Medical Readiness Agency, Falls Church VA · 2020–2024
Executive physician responsible for informatics strategy across a system of 400,000 EHR users and 9.6M patients worldwide. Managed enterprise physician and nursing informatics resources, led the Air Force’s value-based care transition, and directed EHR modernization across a global footprint. Oversaw 5 direct reports and 200+ personnel, realigning 30% of product-line resources and increasing multi-specialty and immunizations medical coding by 50% through data-driven workflow redesign.
It was here, working at the intersection of large-scale data infrastructure and frontline clinical behavior, that the thesis for Data-Only Delusion sharpened into something he couldn’t ignore: organizations were investing in better dashboards and getting worse outcomes, not because the technology failed, but because they had never accounted for the humans reading the screens.
Deputy Chief Medical Officer
Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha NE · 2014–2018
Led Joint Commission and Patient-Centered Medical Home accreditations, oversaw credentialing and provider care quality, and provided medical oversight of flight line and emergency medical programs. Built his expertise in healthcare governance, performance metrics, and the organizational conditions that either enable or suppress good clinical decision-making.
Medical Director
Offutt AFB NE · MacDill AFB FL · 2007–2014
Directed patient safety, care quality, and clinical oversight for 200 medical providers across 30 specialties. Primary pediatric educator and curriculum developer for 75 Family Medicine residents annually. Directed Pediatric Advanced Life Support and Neonatal Resuscitation programs for more than 500 learners. Teaching, mentoring, and watching how training shapes clinical reflex — that was where he first recognized the behavioral patterns that would later become the foundation of his writing.
Education & Credentials
Education
- MS, Clinical Informatics & Patient-Centered Technologies
University of Washington - Fellowship, Clinical Informatics
Madigan Army Medical Center, JBLM WA - Doctor of Medicine
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center - Residency, Pediatrics
Wright Patterson AFB / Wright State University OH - BS, Biomedical Engineering
Texas A&M University - Medical Acupuncture for Physicians
Helms Medical Acupuncture Institute
Board Certifications
- Clinical Informatics — American Board of Preventive Medicine
- Pediatrics — American Board of Pediatrics
- Medical Acupuncturist — Helms Medical Acupuncture for Physicians
Based in
Fort Walton Beach, Florida
Why behavioral science?
Why does a CMIO write about psychology?
The thread running from biomedical engineering at Texas A&M to pediatrics in Ohio to a Clinical Informatics fellowship at Madigan isn’t obvious until you look at what each discipline asks of its practitioners: how does a system — biological, social, technological — actually behave under pressure? And what happens when the model we built for that system doesn’t match the reality on the ground?
Biomedical engineering taught him to think in systems — inputs, outputs, failure modes. Pediatrics taught him that the patient in front of you is never the patient in the chart. Clinical informatics brought those two worlds together and handed him a new problem: why do sophisticated, well-designed information systems so reliably fail to change clinical behavior?
The answer wasn’t in the data. It was in the psychology of the people using it — the cognitive shortcuts they relied on, the hierarchies they deferred to, the workflows that had trained them, click by click, to stop thinking like healers. That’s the through-line. That’s the behavioral-science argument. And it doesn’t end with a dashboard recommendation or a KPI. It ends with a question every clinical leader should be asking: what behavior is this system actually rewarding?