CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, March 25, 2013
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin G125

Speaker: Kenneth D. Mandl, Boston Children’s Hospital | Harvard Medical School
| Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology

Title: Designing the “App Store” for Health

Abstract: Despite the $48 billion dollar Federal investment in health information technology, doctors and hospitals have extraordinary difficulty implementing and using electronic health records (EHRs). How should Medicine construct an intelligent health system that facilitates rapid learning, innovation and transformation in wellness, health care, public health, and research?

Mandl presents the SMART Platform (www.smartplatforms.org), which capacitates EHRs and consumer-facing systems to run substitutable apps. As Mandl described in the New England Journal of Medicine, this software architecture supports creation and sustainability of an extensible ecosystem of apps, and stimulates a market for competition on value and price. The design principle of substitutability produces systems where a physician or researcher or a patient who wishes to add new functionality can simply delete an existing app and download a better one.

Mandl discusses the rapidly approaching tipping point in Medicine’s strategy for managing data and information for health and discovery.

Bio: Kenneth D. Mandl, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Louis Diamond Investigator at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he directs the Intelligent Health Laboratory within “CHIP”, the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program.

Mandl has pioneered and published extensively in the areas of personal health records and biosurveillance. Under a major a HHS initiative, he co-leads the SMART Platforms project, which seeks to create an “app store” for health. He co-directs a CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics working to define the role of online social networks in healthcare and public health.

Recognized for his teaching and research, he has received the Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring at Harvard Medical School and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government to outstanding scientists and engineers.

He has been an advisor to two Directors of the CDC now chairs the Board of Scientific Counselors of the NIH’s National Library of Medicine.

Dr. Mandl has published over 130 papers in the medical literature and has been elected to multiple honor societies including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Society for Pediatric Research, the American College of Medical Informatics and the American Pediatric Society. He leads two postdoctoral training programs in clinical and informatics research and directs the Population Health Track of the new Masters Degree in Biomedical Informatics at HMS. Mandl is a faculty member in the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics and in the Division of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT.