ABOUT
I’ve always been interested in how systems work—and how they can work better.
My career has taken me from accounting and information systems to clinical practice, EHR technology, health informatics, research, and education. What may look like a series of transitions has actually been driven by a consistent interest: understanding how people, information, technology, and processes come together to shape outcomes.
Finding the connections
I've always gravitated toward systems.
As a first-generation college student, I began my undergraduate education studying accounting, with a minor in information systems. Accounting taught me to think structurally, but I found myself increasingly drawn to the technology behind the work—the systems that captured information, transformed it, and made it useful.
After college, I began my career at what was then one of the Big Five accounting firms. It didn't take long for me to find my way from traditional audit work toward information systems and technology. I was fascinated by a deceptively simple idea: input → process → output. What information goes into a system? What happens to it? And what can we learn from what comes out?
My career then took what might seem like an unexpected turn: I became a physical therapist.
Clinical practice changed my perspective. Healthcare wasn't an abstract system anymore. It was one person sitting in front of me, with an individual story, a problem to understand, and an outcome that mattered.
But I continued to notice the systems surrounding those individual encounters—documentation, workflows, measurement, technology, access, and increasingly, the electronic health record. The EHR brought together two parts of my background that had previously seemed separate: clinical care and information systems.
That connection eventually led me toward health informatics and a question that continues to shape my work:
How can we learn from individual patient encounters to improve care for many people at once?
Since then, my work has expanded from clinical practice into EHR implementation, analytics, quality improvement, improvement science, research, and education. The technologies and roles have changed, but the underlying motivation hasn't: understand the system, learn from the data, and use what we learn to make healthcare work better.
A CAREER ACROSS SYSTEMS
BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY
Accounting + Information Systems
CLINICAL PRACTICE
Physical Therapy
EHR & INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Epic + Clinical Analytics
HEALTH INFORMATICS
Data + Clinical Systems
LEARNING HEALTH SYSTEMS
Research + Improvement + Education
Healthcare generates information through every patient encounter. The opportunity is not simply to collect more data, but to connect that information with clinical knowledge, technology, and systematic improvement.
My work focuses on that intersection—using informatics, analytics, and improvement science to understand healthcare systems, identify opportunities for change, and translate what we learn into better practice, education, and outcomes.
MEASURE → LEARN → IMPROVE → SHARE
Professional Bio
Sang (Sam) Pak, PT, DPT, ACHIP, FAMIA, is an Associate Professor and Director of Data Analytics and Improvement Science in the Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science at the University of California, San Francisco.
His work integrates health informatics, data analytics, improvement science, and health services research to advance rehabilitation practice, education, and patient care. His experience spans clinical physical therapy, electronic health record implementation and analytics, quality improvement, outcome measurement, and informatics education.
His work has included implementation of standardized patient-reported outcome measurement, development of clinical and educational analytics dashboards, telehealth implementation and evaluation, and research examining healthcare utilization, social risks, and disparities in rehabilitation access.
Pak is a Fellow of the American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) and an AMIA Certified Health Informatics Professional (ACHIP). He has held national leadership roles in rehabilitation informatics and physical therapy education and regularly presents on health informatics, systems-based practice, data and analytics, AI, and improvement in rehabilitation.