(New York, NY — May 29, 2019) — Andrew Kasarskis, PhD, an internationally recognized expert in biomedical data, has been named Executive Vice President and Chief Data Officer (CDO) of the Mount Sinai Health System. In this new role, Dr. Kasarskis will facilitate the accessibility and sharing of clinical, financial, and administrative data, and open application development, all in support of better patient care, decision-making, and healthcare innovation.

"The addition of this role at Mount Sinai provides an exceptional opportunity to strengthen our healthcare system's overall data literacy and culture," Dr. Kasarskis says. "I want everyone here to view the vast data available to us as an asset we can use objectively to improve efficiency and quality of care, identify patient cohorts for groundbreaking research, enhance the education we provide trainees through the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and add value to all of our organizational efforts."

The creation of this position builds on Mount Sinai's reputation as one of the most innovative healthcare and research organizations in the country by putting data front and center in its organizational efforts to better patient care. Named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in Data Science and Big Data in 2014 and 2016 and one of "Health Care's Most Wired" organizations from the American Hospital Association's (AHA) Health Forum in 2015, 2016, and 2017, Mount Sinai is recognized as a leader in data science capabilities and applications. In addition to Mount Sinai's rich expertise and industry leadership in data science, its large, diverse patient population, robust research programs, and history of launching data-intensive businesses provides the healthcare system a unique opportunity in this space.

Mount Sinai is among the first large healthcare systems to explicitly define this role to advance patient outcomes, innovation, and research. Dr. Kasarskis will take the lead in driving simplification, transparency, and use of Mount Sinai's digital assets, supporting entrepreneurial activities at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and adopting key performance metrics to determine both the impact of infrastructure improvements and the success of each data-driven project going forward.

"By building a data-driven environment where we can assess hospital initiatives for impact, we can achieve a much faster loop to identify treatment-related issues and opportunities, access the necessary data to address them, conceptualize interventions that have the potential to deliver positive patient outcomes, and realize the benefits more quickly and to a much greater extent than was previously possible," said Dr. Kasarskis.

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