Bringing 'Moneyball' to healthcare

A big sign of just how much impact data analytics is having on healthcare is the announcement that one of the Major League Baseball executives from the "Moneyball"-era has joined the faculty of the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI). Paul DePodesta will serve as an STSI assistant professor of bioinformatics.

“Paul brings a valuable outsider’s perspective to medicine that will help make the field more precise and more predictive through the analysis of the vast amounts of individualized data now being collected through genetic testing, wireless sensors and other technologies,” Eric Topol, MD, director of STSI, said in a statement. “We are excited to have him work with our informatics data scientists to jumpstart the ‘Moneyball’ of medicine.”

AT STSI, DePodesta is expected to work on medical data projects with an analytics team led by Ali Torkamani, PhD, associate professor and director of genome informatics.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration plans to hire a data officer as part of its 2016 strategy to improve its internal IT systems. 

The organization has been wrestling with disjointed IT networks that don't efficiently communicate with one another, which complicates the processes of analyzing data for insights, said Todd Simpson, CIO of the FDA, said in a Bloomberg report.

The chief data officer will oversee changes to how the agency uses the information it collects in testing food, drugs and medical devices, Simpson said. “We're a big data shop and data governance is obviously very important to us,” he said. “We believe it's key.”

I think data analytics has become key for more healthcare organizations.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor