Steven J. Stack

Steven J. Stack, MD, MBA was appointed Commissioner of the Kentucky Department for Public Health by Governor Andy Beshear in February 2020. He resides in Lexington, KY and is a board-certified emergency physician.

For more than 20 years, Stack has been a leader in the medical profession. He has served on boards of directors and in senior leadership roles for numerous geographic and specialty medical societies. In 2006, he was the first emergency physician ever elected to the American Medical Association (AMA) board of trustees, subsequently serving as board chair and in 2015-2016 as the AMA’s youngest president since 1854.

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 has more than 18 years of emergency medicine administrative and clinical practice experience in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee.

In 2018, Stack joined The University of Tennessee Haslam College of Business as adjunct professor. In this role, he lectures onhealthcare policy and the mechanics of advocacy to physicians in the Physician Executive MBA (PEMBA) program as well as to both physician and non-physician healthcare leaders enrolled in executive education programs.

Stack has focused experience in health information technology (IT). A nationally recognized advocate, he bridges bedside care with governmental policy and has served on numerous federal advisory committees for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) from 2010-2016. Additionally, he served from 2012-2016 as board member and secretary of eHealth Initiative, a Washington, DC-based non-profit association improving health care through the advancement of health IT. His other areas of expertise include emergency department and hospital management, health system reform, physician licensure and regulation, and healthcare anti-trust issues.

Stack has extensive experience in policymaking and advocacy at federal, state, and county levels before legislative bodies and executive branch regulatory agencies. He is also a skilled public spokesperson and longtime advocate for universal access to affordable and high quality healthcare.

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 to complete medicalschool and emergency medicine residency at Ohio State University before moving to Memphis to begin his clinical practice. In 2006, Dr. Stack and his family relocated to Lexington. And, in December 2017, he completed his MBA at UT Knoxville Haslam College of Business.

Stack is married and the proud father of one daughter. His wife, Tracie, is an MD, PhD and practicing board-certified allergy/asthma/ immunology specialist. 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.