Dr. Homer Chin was born in Okinawa and grew up in the Sudan (Africa) and Hong Kong. He came to the US and attended college at UC Berkeley, majoring in Bioengineering. He obtained his MD degree from Dartmouth Medical School, completed a residency in internal medicine, and did a fellowship in medical informatics at Stanford University, before joining Kaiser Permanente. He was associate medical director for clinical information systems at Kaiser Permanente Northwest until his retirement from that position in 2013.

Dr. Chin is an affiliate professor at Oregon Health & Sciences University and on the board of OCHIN–a organization that supports information systems for clinics that serve mainly the medicaid and medically indigent population. He is currently working with Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School on the OpenNotes initiative–working to give patients easy and transparent access to their medical records.

He is married with 2 young sons.