Steven J. Stack

Steven J. Stack, MD, an emergency physician residing in Lexington, Ky., became the 170th president of the American Medical Association in June 2015. Board-certified in emergency medicine, Dr. Stack currently practices in Lexington and surrounding central Kentucky. He is the youngest AMA president since 1854.

Dr. Stack has served as medical director of multiple emergency departments, including St. Joseph East (Lexington), St. Joseph Mt. Sterling (rural eastern Kentucky) and Baptist Memorial Hospital (Memphis, Tenn.). He is the first emergency medicine boardcertified physician to serve on the AMA Board of Trustees (BOT).

Dr. Stack has special expertise in health information technology (IT) and has led multiple AMA efforts in this area. He has been a member of numerous federal advisory committees for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), including the Health IT Safety Center Task Force, the Health IT Implementation, Usability and Safety workgroup, the Information Exchange workgroup, the PCAST Report workgroup, and the Strategic Plan workgroup. A member of its board of directors since 2011, Dr. Stack has also served the past three years as the secretary of eHealth Initiative, a non-profit association committed to improving health care through the advancement of health IT.

Additionally, Dr. Stack has made notable contributions to the areas of physician licensure, regulation and assessment. He has served as chair of the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) Maintenance of Licensure (MOL) Implementation Group and as a member of its predecessor, the MOL Advisory Group. He has also contributed in 2014 as a member of the FSMB Special Committee on Strategic Positioning; a role similar to his prior participation on FSMB's 2008–2009 Strategic Repositioning Task Force.

For two decades, Dr. Stack has demonstrated his professional commitment as an elected leader within numerous specialty and geographic medical professional associations at both the national and state level in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. During his AMA-BOT tenure he has served as board chair in 2012–2013 as well as chair of the Compensation Committee, the Communications Strategies Committee, and the Awards and Nominations Committee.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Dr. Stack graduated magna cum laude from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he was a Henry Bean Scholar for classical studies. He then returned to Ohio, where he completed his medical school and emergency medicine residency training at the Ohio State University before moving to Memphis to begin his clinical practice. In June 2006 Dr. Stack and his family relocated to Lexington to be closer to their families in Ohio.

Dr. Stack is married and the proud father of a 10-yearold daughter. His wife, Tracie, is an MD, PhD, practicing board-certified specialist in allergy/immunology and fellow AMA member. In his leisure time, Dr. Stack enjoys the study of classical Greek and Roman history, United States presidential history, photography, and traveling with his wife and daughter.

2015–2016