Data Science for Healthcare

By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist

On this episode I spoke to Kim Nilsson, CEO of Pivigo (@Pivigo) and an Astrophysicist. Kim is on her second of perhaps multiple careers that began looking at the stars and is currently looking at data. After getting her PhD she decided to get an MBA and like other guests on this show discovered the importance of the adjacent possible meeting her co-founder of Pivigo who was in recruitment and struggling to match talent with opportunities and businesses.

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The school environment brought different people together who connected and engaged, often with no initial purpose in mind, and provided a background in setting up a business. They have had some great success with the Parts Alliance who started out thinking they did not have a lot of useful data and were surprised to find with the keen eye of a skilled data scientist to discover they had wealth of useful data that was turned into a 30% revenue increase.

We discuss the opportunity for healthcare and data science that breaks down into:

  • Drug Discovery (worth noting that Remdesivir that is in the news is a drug that was found based on these principles)
  • Predictive medicine (radiology image scanning and eye scans for Alzheimer’s)
  • Operational efficiency (thinking about the death of the waiting room!)

We talk about the things holding healthcare back that run into access to data (knowing where it is, cleaning it up and determining who has the access and rights) and the incredibly challenging but important topic of privacy, security, and ethics especially with everyone sensitized to the Cambridge Analytica. The key point worth highlighting here is the consideration for the future use cases of the data. What may be fine now and for a specific purpose may be abused at some point in the future and it is essential that we account and incorporate the right data controls to prevent misuse.

Listen in to hear about the use case of diet and drugs and her key point for healthcare to consider as they think about how they can use Data Scientists.

About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.

This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.