Hal Stern, Vice President and Chief information Officer of Janssen Research and Development discussed “The Impact of COVID on Medical R&D”. A summary of Hal’s presentation and his bio are below.
Medical R&D is moving away from paper on glass to truly data flow driven systems to improve efficiency and effectiveness of innovation
One of the challenges of healthcare technology is not just the regulatory view of privacy, but also assuring data privacy in remixing and combining data sets.
Real world example: you might not care about recycling until someone goes through your recycling and shows the world you enjoy drinking cheap wine
Similarly we have to expand our notions of patient consent much the way the publishing industry expanded its view of all-or-nothing copyrights with Creative Commons licensing.
Diversity in a team’s background and cross-industry collaboration is crucial to remain competitive and innovative
Some of the day to day complexities include the ongoing challenge of managing a tremendous amount of data.
- This includes targeting the relevant population for each medical issue.
- Understanding the variances across the population.
- Narrow definitions of the problem or input space may result in degenerate machine learning systems (ML systems confusing chihuahuas and blueberry muffins, or afghan and Saruman).
Recommended reading material from Hal:
- Smart Take from the Strong – Pete Carrill
- Range – David Epstein
- Weird – Olga Khazan
- Fermat’s Enigma – Simon Singh
- Thinking in Bets – Annie Duke
- How to Decide – Annie Duke
Hal Stern’s Bio
Hal Stern is the VP and CIO of Janssen R&D, where his team designs and delivers the end to end systems to support discovery, product development, clinical trials, regulatory, safety and quality processes. Hal has strong interests in data science, non-traditional and applied computing techniques, security, privacy, large-scale networking and intellectual property management and policies. He joined Janssen from Merck & Company, where he was AVP, Merck Research Labs Engineering. Before joining Merck, Hal had a 25 year career in the technology industry, with a variety of software and services leadership positions at Juniper Networks, Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems. He is co-inventor on 11 United States patents in the areas of networking, security and user experience and co-author of three technical books: “Managing NFS & NIS” (O’Reilly), “Blueprints for High Availability” (Wiley) and “Professional WordPress: Design and Development” (Wrox/Wiley). Hal holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, and he serves on the graduate board of the Colonial Club at Princeton. Hal and his wife Toby have two adult children, and outside of work he plays the bass guitar, coaches Under-8 Mite ice hockey for the New Jersey Devils Youth club, and enjoys live music, photography, cooking, reading and travel.
