Life as a Health Data Scientist

A group of Graduate students at the Georgetown HIDS program applying design thinking to Health data  "Make it simple but significant" -- Don Draper, a fictional character on the AMC's TV Show Mad Men.  We could easily attribute Don's success with his advertising campaigns to meticulous application of design thinking. Design thinking is a breakthrough model for human-centered innovation and problem solving where multi-disciplinary teams work iteratively to rapidly prototype products. This process of 1. Need finding 2. Ideation 3. Prototyping 4. Testing 5. Implementing and then back to 1. Need finding has been used across sectors to solve complex problems such as redesigning school curriculum to connect students to the world outside classrooms and designing future aircraft cabins. Last week, our students learned that applying design thinking to healthcare can improve patient and provider experiences as well as reduce medical errors, especially in this day an

Developing a new drug costs $2.56 billion! (Tufts Study ) We all agree that data-driven drug development can help reduce costs and save time. But how do we collectively make this happen? This was the topic of discussion at a panel organized by the Center for Data Innovation, a non-profit, non-partisan think tank studying the intersection of data, technology and policy. Our panel with Chris Austin , Director of NCATS and Brad Casey , Associate Director of Research Programs at Michael J Fox foundation  was facilitated by Joshua New, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center. We were asked to discuss opportunities and challenges in creating a National Health Data Research Exchange to drive data-driven drug development. I share with you salient points from our panel discussion here.  Why Now? Lot has changed over the last decade to enable this data-driven innovation. Due to digital transformation of the healthcare ecosystem, >95% of hospitals have adopted Electronic Hea