Taha Kass-Hout

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Amazon hires openFDA trailblazer Kass-Hout for healthcare project: report

Nick Paul Taylor | FierceBiotech | March 19, 2018

Amazon has hired former FDA chief health informatics officer Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., CNBC reports. Kass-Hout led the groundbreaking openFDA initiative and rehabilitated the reputation of the FDA’s IT department during his three years at the agency. Details of what Kass-Hout will do at Amazon are scarce....during his time at the FDA, Kass-Hout lead the precisionFDA program that established a collaborative, open approach to genomic testing references. Across the initiatives, Kass-Hout deployed approaches that were established in tech circles but alien to the FDA prior to his arrival. Open-source projects that embraced the cloud, shared their code on GitHub and invited programmers to hackathons became commonplace.

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API Provides Open Access To FDA Recall Data

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | July 21, 2014

As part of the Food and Drug Administration’s recently launched openFDA initiative, the regulatory agency is for the first time offering an application programming interface providing web developers and researchers direct access to millions of reports on drug adverse events and medication errors that have been submitted to the FDA since 2004...

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FDA Embracing Cloud, APIs In OpenFDA Initiative

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | November 20, 2014

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is leveraging the cloud as part of its openFDA initiative to make data on recalls and adverse events easily accessible to software developers and researchers...

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FDA Hits Tight Timeline for Start of precisionFDA Open Beta

Nick Paul Taylor | FierceBiotechIT | December 21, 2015

FDA has hit the tight timeline it set itself for the start of the precisionFDA open beta program. The system went live this week, just as the regulator forecast when it started a closed beta program last month. Taha Kass-Hout, chief health informatics officer at FDA, committed to trying to have precisionFDA ready for testing by the end of the year back when the regulator first outlined the project in August. That Kass-Hout was willing to aim for such a timeline--which at the time he described as being "very, very tight"--and then went on to achieve it is testament to the new approach the regulator is taking to IT projects.

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FDA Issues RFQ for Large Scale EHR Study - Wants to Leverage VA's Open Source VistA EHR and Database for Research

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) for a large-scale electronic health record (EHR) system. This RFQ is very important as the objective is to develop a platform to support a critical project by the FDA's Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (DBB) "to conduct research to assess the safety and surveillance of FDA regulated products through the FDA adverse event reporting systems..." Adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the US, thus finding which drugs cause negative interactions is of vital importance. The project requires "use of the large electronic medical record (EMR) system..." The project is going to leverage the largest, most comprehensive, and clinically relevant medical records database, that of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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FDA Starts Beta-testing 'The Most Advanced Bioinformatics Platform in the World'

Nick Paul Taylor | FierceBiotechIT | November 16, 2015

The FDA has started testing the precisionFDA platform it developed with DNAnexus. The closed beta test phase is the precursor to a more widespread rollout of the system, which the CEO of DNAnexus has described as being "the most advanced bioinformatics platform in the world." DNAnexus was enlisted by the FDA to help with the project in August...

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FDA’s Public Data Project To Get An Upgrade Under $1.2M Contract

Whitney Blair Wyckoff | Fed Scoop | January 29, 2015

In an ongoing effort to improve openFDA, San Francisco-based Iodine will work on making the portal more user friendly...

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Health IT 2014: Interoperability, Ebola And Healthcare.gov 2.0

Billy Mitchell | FedScoop | December 18, 2014

Health IT in 2014 continued its path toward a system of interoperable and open data to improve patient care with IT systems...

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How openFDA's 'Crazy Collision' of Silicon Valley and Federal Culture Is Reshaping the Regulator

Nick Paul Taylor | FierceBiotechIT | August 31, 2015

Over the past two years the reputation of the IT department at the FDA has changed rapidly. Once best known for burning through CIOs and receiving slapdowns from the congressional watchdog, the FDA is now garnering plaudits for its embrace of agile and open development. This new way of thinking is central to--and to an extent responsible for--the recently unveiled precisionFDA initiative. Bio-IT World dug into the genesis of precisionFDA and its implications in a feature this week.

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Mining Data For State CDC, Maine HIE Pilot Project Aims For Population Analysis

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | September 10, 2012

The Maine HealthInfoNet is aggregating and analyzing health information exchange data at the population level, with the aim of finding trends and specific figures that currently evade most tools of epidemiology. Read More »

OpenFDA Backstory: Breaking The Paperwork Backlog

David F. Carr | InformationWeek Government | June 5, 2014

The startup Captricity uses a combination of crowdsourcing and OCR to digitize mountains of paper records, particularly for government agencies and healthcare. Read More »

OpenFDA Backstory: Breaking The Paperwork Backlog

David F. Carr | Information Week | June 5, 2014

The startup Captricity uses a combination of crowdsourcing and OCR to digitize mountains of paper records, particularly for government agencies and healthcare...

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The White House Is Pushing Precision Medicine, but It Won’t Happen for Years

Mike Orcutt | MIT Technology Review | July 18, 2016

For starters, it’s too expensive and the science isn’t advanced enough. With the right technologies to collect and make sense of biomedical information, we could speed up the pace of discoveries that lead to a new class of tailor-made drugs. That’s the argument behind the White House’s push for “precision medicine” (see “A Shot in the Arm for Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative”). The goal of precision medicine is to provide drugs and therapies that are uniquely suited to individual patients based on their genetics and other distinguishing health information...

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2019 State Healthcare IT Connect Summit

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
March 18, 2019 (All day) - March 20, 2019 (All day)

States are coordinating major initiatives including data governance and interoperability, Medicaid modernization, MMIS re-procurement, HIX operations, payment reform, population health, program integrity as well as data privacy, security, and compliance issues at many levels. At the same time, the shift towards modularity, SaaS and cloud computing are helping to shape IT organizations to be more responsive to the needs of policy and administration leadership. Emerging and potentially disruptive technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence are also being piloted in Medicaid which has the potential to yield benefits beyond process automation and interoperability and potentially underpin the next phase of HHS innovation.

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