I met with a few folks from Stanford University while I was in Palo Alto on my way to DC for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) symposium. Nigam Shah and Ron Li are focused on "delivery science" of new technological capabilities and each lead groups sponsored by and embedded in the healthcare organization at Stanford to bring innovation to practice. The Stanford Health Care IT team comprises 900 people (no, it's not a typo) and has many divisions and a very large budget. Embedding into this team is key to their success.
Nigam leads the Program for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, whose mission is to bring machine learning and AI to the clinic safely and responsibly.
Before writing the first line of code for an AI algorithm, we study the system and ask several questions, such as: If you had a prediction, what action would you take, how often, on how many people, and what would it cost? Based on the answers, we figure out the minimum performance measures a model must have to be useful. This design analysis upfront is done before building any potential solution.
Nigam is also part of a broader Coalition for Health AI.
Ron Li is the co-founder and director for the Stanford Emerging Applications Lab (SEAL), which helps clinicians and staff build ideas into novel digital products that are prototyped and tested for care delivery at Stanford Health Care. Ron is also part of the Stanford Center for Digital Health, whose Decoding Digital Health newsletter I read regularly. Ron asked me what I mean by “digital health” and what I mean by “informatics.” In the US, digital health is largely used to talk about remote monitoring and patient devices for monitoring health. Ron believes informatics has a science behind it, but digital health is a term anyone can use without any definition or rigor. He’s interested in helping create principled definitions and scientific principles for digital health.
Are you thinking what I’m thinking:
1) We both have a lot to learn from each other. Let me know if you want to be involved in follow-up conversations.
2) How many centres (actually centers) are there at Stanford related to digital health, data science, and informatics? A lot. They are very fragmented and seen as valid, diverse pathways to the same end: bringing innovation and data-driven insight to patients and care delivery. Here is a list Nigam put together of those that he knows about in the domain of AI and digital health.
3) Their model is quite unique in that their major KPI (at least for now) is to help Stanford Health Care be innovative, which they believe will lead to better care. Many of the academic staff at Stanford Health Care go to Stanford because they want to innovate, so these groups are constructed to support bottom-up innovation that aligns with strategic goals but isn’t necessarily driven from the top.
I spent a few days in my hometown of Salt Lake City before going to Stanford. The Fall leaves still had some color under the snow, and I attended the premiere of my daughter Clare’s ski movie that she and two friends skied in, filmed, produced, and directed. It felt really good to see family again and share my pictures and recordings of wildlife from my Warranwood neighborhood.
Mount Superior View from my dad's window Son, step mom, daughter
Niece, mom, sister Alta/Snowbird border BRAIDS movie HVE FVN
Daniel, Kit, and I are in DC now for the AMIA Annual Symposium and I’ll share some learnings from AMIA next week.
Regional Linguistic Quirks: Even in DC I learned a new Australian saying! Jon Patrick from University of Sydney and an NLP colleague is here, and he said “they weren’t even within cooee of that” meaning “they weren’t even close.” Wikipedia has a really interesting history of the word and the phrase that I recommend.
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