In Memory of

Class of 1967
Aug 09, 1949 - Nov 21, 2019

Simon Philip Cohn, MD, was born on Aug. 9, 1949, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, to Adrian and Barbara Cohn and passed away on Nov. 21, 2019, in Oakland, CA, from glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer. In 1950 his family moved to California, and he graduated from Aragon High School, Class of 1967, in San Mateo, CA. In California, he gained a love for a daily swim and received a BA and MPH from the University of California, Berkeley, and a MD in 1975 from the University of California, Davis. After Medical School, he spent two years working with a branch of the US Public Health Service providing healthcare in a coal mining region of North Central West Virginia. During that time, he met the love of his life, Janet, whom he married and with whom he spent a lifetime.
Simon was an Emergency Physician and national leader in the fields of Electronic Health Records, clinical data/health information and payment policy. Simon's medical informatics interests began in 1984, when, using his personal Apple Macintosh computer, he developed a widely used medical charting application for the Emergency Department.
Simon continued working in the field of medical informatics, rising to become the Associate Executive Medical Director for Health Information and Payment Policy at Kaiser Permanente. In this area, Simon worked on Kaiser's first Clinical Information Systems Strategy, helped implement HIPAA and national medical record standards, and served as chair of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics from 2005-2008. He received a great deal of recognition for this work, becoming a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Medicine in 1988; winning a Leadership in Technology Award with his Workgroup on Electronic Data Interchange in 2005 and the President's Award by AMIA; and being named a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of California, Davis School of Medicine in 2011. His life was very much about service, and he was deeply proud of his contributions to his community and profession. He is survived by his wife Janet, their two children, Jonathan (Jaimie Baron) and Rebecca, their two grandchildren, Kai and Audrey, his sister, Sara, and many other beloved family, friends, and colleagues.