Living Well Through Data Roundup

Rock Health teamed up with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine to host a full day conference all about health data. Check out pictures from the day here.

Dean Charney opened the day with an inside look into Mount Sinai’s strategy to lead the way in health informatics. We then heard from three physicians from Columbia, NYC, and Mount Sinai around what features they look for in data applications.


Midmorning, Eric Schadt shared his work out of the institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology. John Wilbanks closed the morning with an invigorating talk on privacy that challenged to the audience to find a solution to anonyomized data that still has meaningful use.

Afternoon sessions began with leaders from innovative companies like Merck, GNS Healthcare, RelayHealth, and Ginger.io, who are all utilizing data analytics at the core of their businesses. Some of their methods include: utilization of claims data to evaluate drug outcomes, predictions of disease mechanisms, and drug targets from patient data and collections of data from use on cellphone activity to predict mental and physical ailments. We then heard from three health sensor companies: AgaMatrix, Cardiio, and BodyMedia on their technologies and data streams of information. Mid afternoon, Steven Dean and George Church shared new ways that patients are empowered by their own data from personal genomic sequencing to self-tracking.

Dennis Auseillo, wrapped up the day with a look into how the New Biology of the 21st Century will utilize data. He sees the next step as a cross-disciplinary integration where life science research is performed by physical & computational scientists as well as engineers. Technological advances will also enable biologists to collect data unprecedented in quantity and quality.