DJ Patil is a smart guy who knows data – and he’ll play a key role in President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. But what the White House’s first-ever Chief Data Scientist is short on? On-the-job experience in healthcare.
But that could be OK. Patil has worked at some Silicon Valley giants – LinkedIn, eBay, PayPal, Skype, and venture firm Greylock Partners. President Obama personally sought out Patil for the job – and now, he’ll represent the government’s newly heavy focus on big data, particularly as it applies to healthcare.
Through the course of Patil’s career, he’s hopped from sector to sector – so he’ll likely be able to transpose his big data expertise to the medical arena as well.
Patil spoke today at the Strata +Hadoop World big data conference, during which he outlined the priorities of his new role. The confluence of health information and big data are of critical importance to this precision medicine effort from the government – and will be a key component of Patil’s new role. Aligning electronic health records with bioinformatics data – all the while ensuring consumer privacy – will be of utmost importance, he said.
“Let’s start bringing the data science and the bioinformatics together,” Patil said. “How can we bring these two communities together for the biggest bang for the buck?”
Patil said he’s begun collaborating with Philip Bourne, the National Institutes of Health Associate Director for Data Science. Bourne’s role at the NIH has been to make biomedical research datasets more accessible and ready for analysis.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In October 2012, Patil wrote a blog about how we can consumerize healthcare. It’s an interesting example of how Patil may apply his smarts in other arenas to tackle healthcare.
“There are tremendous opportunities to apply lessons learned in the consumer space to the health care sector,” he writes. “We know the space needs disruption and it is a way to make constructive disruption with a rapid adoption cycle.”
He discusses the amount of time physicians take struggling with the current health IT infrastructure – and how there’s no reason why such a highly trained professional set should be so challenged with the lumbering EHRs that are now in place. He suggested to build systems that create a dialogue with users – kind of like Amazon.com does when it provides suggestions to browsers using its site. Did a doctor mean to prescribe that specific dose? Such prompts, used by consumer sites like Amazon, could be of utmost importance in healthcare, Patil argues.
But that was two-and-a-half years ago. Patil was creating dialogue with that blog – but now he’s in a position to make some of this a reality. In the absence of knowing his specific plans in making population health management a working reality or integrating wide-ranging genome studies, let’s take a look at who Patil appears to be:
He’s smart. He got his big data start as a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, working in the late hours of the night – when computers were free, he said – to study open datasets published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make major improvements in numerical weather forecasting.
Most recently, he served as vice president of product at RelateIQ, a customer relationship management startup that “applies data science to decision making” and was acquired by Salesforce.com for about $400 million. He also was recently the data scientist-in-residence at Greylock, and has a number of accolades to his name – he was named a 2014 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and was ranked by Forbes as one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists.
Patil’s also got a fairly obvious liberal bent – just check out his Twitter feed, and his “heavy heart” regarding the Ferguson decision. The man also has quite the sense of humor – just check out his Einsteinian costume choice – or a Easter Egg reference in his LinkedIn profile to Harry Potter.
In short, Patil has got some solid cred in the data biz – and a keen enough mind to make sense of the quagmire that is health IT. A Wired reporter wrote of Patil:
There is arguably no one better suited to help the country better embrace the relatively new discipline of data science than Patil. He is often credited with coining the term. In 2012, he co-authored the Harvard Business Review article that called out “data scientist” as the sexiest job of the 21st century. At the time, he was the data-scientist-in-residence at Greylock Partners, where he shared with me his life’s mantra: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.”
