From left: Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System; and Christoph Meinel, PhD, Chief Executive Officer, Hasso Plattner Institute, and Dean, Joint Digital Engineering Faculty, Hasso Plattner Institute and University of Potsdam.
The Mount Sinai Health System and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), a leading data science research and educational institution in Germany, have formed an affiliation that will combine their expertise in health care delivery, biomedical and digital engineering, and artificial intelligence. The aim is to develop digital health tools with real-time predictive and preventive capabilities that empower patients and health care providers and improve health outcomes.
Erwin P. Bottinger, MD, left, and Joel Dudley, PhD, are co-directors of the new Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai.
The newly formed Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai will be led by Joel Dudley, PhD, Executive Vice President for Precision Health, Mount Sinai Health System, Mount Sinai Professor in Biomedical Data Science, and Director of the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Erwin P. Bottinger, MD, Professor of Digital Health-Personalized Medicine, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany, and Head of HPI’s Digital Health Center. A $15 million gift from the Hasso Plattner Foundation will establish the new Institute, which was announced in March at the Icahn School of Medicine.
“This endeavor will usher in a new era of digital health at Mount Sinai that advances the field of precision medicine,” says Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System. “By leveraging our shared knowledge and academic excellence, Mount Sinai and HPI are positioned to find solutions that will revolutionize health care and science, and improve health nationally and globally.”
The Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai joins more than 20 institutes launched at the Icahn School of Medicine. Its goals include building a digital health population of engaged participants to collect comprehensive and longitudinal health data from wearable devices, genetic sequencing, and electronic health records; creating a cloud-based health data platform for research and care using machine learning and artificial intelligence; and researching and testing prototype digital health solutions for patients, providers, and health systems. Mount Sinai’s expertise in genomics, big data, supercomputing, and bioinformatics—along with a large and diverse patient population and an ability to translate from the lab directly to the clinic—provides a foundation for the Institute.
For example, the Institute for Next Generation Healthcare (INGH), under the leadership of Dr. Dudley, has developed a translational biomedical research model using advances in clinical medicine, digital health, and artificial intelligence, and INGH’s Lab 100 is leveraging data and technology to redesign the way health is measured and health care is delivered. In another innovative effort, the BioMe™ BioBank Program, housed at The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at Mount Sinai, is enabling researchers to conduct genetic, epidemiologic, molecular, and genomic studies on large collections of research specimens linked with electronic health records. Until 2015, Dr. Bottinger was Professor of Medicine (Nephrology), and Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine, and he helped lay the groundwork for the BioBank Program and The Institute for Personalized Medicine.
“Investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Hasso Plattner Institute have been publishing groundbreaking work in the areas of genome diagnostics, precision medicine, digital health, biomedical data science, artificial intelligence, and information technology,” says Dr. Dudley. “We believe the new Institute will help turn the promise of digital health into reality at the front lines of next generation health care.”
Dr. Bottinger says, “We know we can save lives, prevent disease, and improve the health of patients with artificial intelligence in real-time analysis of health data from electronic health records, genetic information, and mobile sensor technologies.”