Is a detailed career plan the key to success, or is the secret to follow your curiosity and build what's missing in the world? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we explore the nontraditional career path of a true physician innovator, Dr. Gaurav Singal. He shares why abandoning a rigid plan in favor of serendipity and a passion for building led him from medicine to the forefront of health technology. This episode unpacks the story of a physician who has consistently identified problems in healthcare and built the technology to solve them, offering invaluable lessons for anyone looking to merge a clinical background with an entrepreneurial spirit.
Dr. Gaurav Singal's physician entrepreneur journey is a masterclass in applying technical skills to solve real-world medical challenges. He candidly shares his origin story, from an early love for computer science and robotics to a circuitous entry into medicine, not with a plan to practice, but to understand the human body as a machine that could be fixed with technology. This builder's mindset first emerged in medical school, where he created solutions for his peers out of necessity, most notably the platform Rotating Room - a marketplace for short-term housing for medical students and professionals that is now used by every medical school in the country. We then dive into his experience at MGH building what would become Qpid Health, where he harnessed natural language processing (NLP) to extract critical, unstructured information from the electronic medical record (EMR), dramatically improving provider access to patient history and saving countless hours of manual chart review.
The core of our conversation explores Dr. Singal's defining role as Chief Data Officer at Foundation Medicine. He details the vision behind building the revolutionary Foundation Medicine real-world data platform, linking the world's largest cancer genomics dataset with clinical records from partners like Flatiron Health. This effort created the clinical genomic database, a powerful tool that accelerated research, enabled novel trial designs, and established new business lines in clinical trial matching and recruitment. Dr. Singal's story is a testament to the power of a physician innovator to create entirely new categories within a life sciences company. Looking to the future, he shares his excitement for what's next: bringing AI in clinical decision support directly to the bedside to turbocharge physicians and fundamentally improve patient outcomes.
Introduction
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome to HealthTech Remedy. We're doing something special today. You are tuning in to an episode on our bonus series on physician innovators, a special series where we sit down with doctors who stepped beyond the clinic to create new solutions, lead in biotech and health tech, and shape the future of care delivery. While we typically focus on the companies and their stories in health technology, today we're focusing on the individuals that make that happen. I'm Trevor Royce, joined as always by my co-hosts Tim Showalter and Paul Gerrard.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Hi, I'm Tim Showalter, and I'm excited to learn from our guests and explore how physicians are applying their medical knowledge in unconventional ways, from building companies and products and driving change as investors and ecosystem leaders.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And I'm Paul Gerrard. We'll be learning how these physician innovators navigated their pivots, what inspired them, and what advice they have for others thinking beyond the bedside.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Today, we're thrilled to kick off the series with Dr. Gaurav Singal, a practicing physician at Brigham and Women's in Boston, Massachusetts, medical school faculty member at Harvard, and technologist, executive, investor, and advisor. We're looking forward to having him on the show today.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I first heard about Gaurav during my time at Flatiron Health, and his legacy loomed large there within the Roche ecosystem, as Gaurav was chief data officer at Foundation Medicine, where he oversaw the design and development of its real-world data platform, where clinical data was linked with biobank samples with the largest cancer genomics data set in the world. And it's really hard to overstate how powerful that tool was when Flatiron and Foundation partnered to have an innovative partnership with the clinical genomic database that offered to accelerate research with genomic testing and Flatiron's real-world data set.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: He's also a key connector in the biotech ecosystem, now advising, investing, and incubating a portfolio of companies spanning diagnostics, therapeutics, data science, and venture capital on topics including computational diagnostics, real-world data, and tech-enabled clinical development. He continues to see patients as a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and is on the faculty and board of advisors at Harvard Medical School, where he directs a course on health technology and innovation. Gaurav, welcome to HealthTech Remedy. We're excited to have you.
Dr. Gaurav Singal: Thanks, Paul. Wonderful to be here.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Gaurav, it's great to have you on the show today. Your journey with health technology has been an inspiration for a lot of the folks in the Boston area and beyond. To kick things off, we'd love to start with your origin story. How'd you get started down this path? It's a pretty nontraditional path for a physician.
From Computer Science to Medicine: Dr. Gaurav Singal's Origin Story
Dr. Gaurav Singal: I'd say a nontraditional path for a physician probably defines the arc of my career. I grew up in a family of doctors, didn't really want to be a doctor, and always loved computers and nerdy things. I ended up studying computer science and electrical engineering as an undergrad at Columbia and was really excited about robotics at the time. This was in the early 2000s.
While I started being really interested in the hardware side of things, as I got deeper into robotics and autonomous vehicles and machine vision, I got very excited about computer science and artificial intelligence, ultimately bringing me to neuroscience and full circle back to medicine. I ended up applying pretty late to medical school toward the end of undergrad, deciding that that was something that might be interesting to me.
To be honest, I probably came to medical school for the wrong reasons. I decided to come to medical school because I wanted to study the human body almost as a machine and figure out how to fix it with technology. And again, this was early in the mid-2000s. I thought I would work on neural prosthetics and that's what brought me to medical school. So to answer your question, I came to medicine a bit circuitously, always thinking I would be a technologist and a computer scientist, and then became fascinated with neuroscience and things like that. Then I came full circle because I fell in love with indeed technological applications in healthcare, but recognized they were far broader than just neuroscience.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I love that story, Gaurav, and it's really distinguished by a curiosity and desire to learn new things about different aspects of both computer science and biotechnology. I'm curious, at that point when you were thinking about applying to medical school, were you picturing an entrepreneurial angle or were you thinking about practicing medicine ultimately on the career side? What direction were you picturing along that pathway?
Dr. Gaurav Singal: I love this question, Tim, because it implies that I might have had a plan when I did all of this. I've been asked, as probably all of us have throughout my career, what do you want to be in two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years? To be honest, I've never really had an answer to that question. Still don't, candidly. So to answer your question directly, I didn't really have a vision of what that would look like. It was really a local near-term thought process of, hey, I'm really interested in computer science and artificial intelligence, but the application space that really compels me is healthcare. And within healthcare, it feels like there's a lot of different directions this could go. So that's the direction I should go.
That was the extent of the thinking. I will say, though, that entrepreneurship was not really anywhere on the radar. Frankly, I had not been exposed to it at all. Both my parents were doctors, and I didn't really have a lot of entrepreneurism in my extended family. So I came to medical school thinking that I would work at this intersection of healthcare and technology, largely through academia. What exactly that meant in terms of a combination of science and research and clinical practice was not clear to me. But, for example, part of my training included doing a thesis at MIT in computational vision, and I assumed that's the direction that things would take.
When it felt to me that science and research wasn't the direction for me, that's when I felt a little bit lost. I took a year off after the third year of medical school, thinking that I would go work as an engineer for a cardiac electrophysiology company and got a bunch of advice, most notably from my uncle who teaches at Harvard Business School, that I should consider opportunities in industry, which, again, weren't on my radar, except as a researcher or a scientist or an engineer. It was through his advice that I ended up landing a gig at Third Rock Ventures, in medical school as an associate between my third and fourth years of medical school and got a very deep immersion into entrepreneurship, into company creation, into investing—although, to be honest, less so than the company creation part, which, as you know, was a core part of Third Rock Ventures, especially in those days—and very quickly fell in love with it.
So I think, again, not having a plan probably was helpful to me because if I had had a plan, it would not have been this. And so not having a plan left me open to serendipity, which is how I've pieced the story together in retrospect.
Dr. Trevor Royce: That's amazing. I think that's a core theme that we hear a lot when we talk with folks. There are these, not to be overly reductive, but two paths in life. One is the complete planner where you know you've always wanted to be a physician, you do everything to go down that path and practice medicine and so forth. Or the other is just be an independent thinker with an open mind and see kind of where life takes you and all the while just excel and do great work along the way and follow where your interests take you.
And I think that reflection as an independent thinker, I suspect, has helped you a lot in some of the entrepreneurial paths and the building that you've done. Related to that, when do you recall a moment when you first had the itch to actually start building some applications? I'm curious to hear a little bit about the Rotating Room story, because I'm certainly someone that benefited directly from that when I was a trainee thinking about doing away rotations and so forth.
The Entrepreneurial Itch: Building Rotating Room from Personal Necessity
Dr. Gaurav Singal: Trevor, first of all, I don't think you're being overly reductive. I've always thought about the world in those poles as well. And candidly, I can think of two specific people who I won't name, but folks I have tremendous respect for and trained with who are diametrically opposite in the two dimensions that you just articulated. One who I think has known from high school that he wants to be president of the United States and I think has a reasonable shot of doing so. I think he's constructed a career that will really prepare him well for that. And another who I think, more like me, has more intuitively followed the turns in the road as they've presented themselves. And again, both have been extremely successful and are wonderful human beings and I respect them tremendously. So I agree with you. I think both those paths are true and equally compelling depending on your personal approach to life.
To your latter question, you've hit the nail on the head. The thing that I finally realized in medical school is that at my core, I am a builder. And that's what inspires me more than a student or a researcher or a scientist. And that's the thing that I think ultimately compelled me away from research and toward entrepreneurship.
In terms of when that clicked for me, I think that's been true since I was a kid. I spent my very early childhood building ASCII games for DOS computers in QBasic with a buddy of mine who was similarly inclined. So I think that streak has run through my entire life. But in terms of it becoming a career, if I even think about medical school, we had to take a stats class first year of med school. And I got very interested in playing squash because the dorms at Harvard had squash courts. I had grown up playing tennis and then racquetball in undergrad.
And so I started playing squash with my med school classmates because, in medical school, there's not a whole lot of time. And having a couple of courts in the basement of the dorms where most of us spent the first year of medical school made it quite easy between classes or after class to sneak in a couple of games. And so I spent the month in January, when we had stats in first year of med school, which I had done a bunch of in undergrad, building a squash ladder and an online reservation system for the school, which ultimately became the thing that all of us used to challenge each other and keep track of our ratings and our game history and things like that. So I think that streak has run all the way back, as far as I can remember from childhood through my career, whether formally or informally. Most of these were just side pet projects.
Rotating Room, which you asked about, Trevor, is a really interesting one for me and one that's very close to my heart. And I think in some ways tells a common story of entrepreneurship, which is that it was born out of personal necessity. The story is basically, as a fourth-year med student, I did an away rotation at Stanford, as many fourth-year med students do in other places, and ran into two problems. One, I had a two-bedroom apartment that I was sharing with another med school classmate in Beacon Hill in Boston, and my roommate didn't want me at the time to list on Craigslist, which was the only avenue.
Because Craigslist was known for scammers, he said, "I don't want to live with a random person, so just eat the rent for a month." And as you know, for a med student, a month of rent is a non-trivial thing to just have to forgo. And on the flip side, looking for places in Palo Alto, probably one of the most expensive places in the country as a med student, was probably doubly as daunting. And with furnished options mostly being corporate housing, or again, Craigslist ads that were hard to trust, it was a real dilemma.
I ended up asking a friend who was a student at Stanford to ask her class. She sent a blast email to all of her classmates asking if anybody had a place I could rent for the month and found several folks in similar situations with roommates who didn't want their rooms exposed. I ended up finding a great place to stay for the month. And so while I was at Stanford, I think when in Stanford, one must create something. I spent a month out there doing a medical rotation in interventional radiology and spent my evenings building this platform, which became Rotating Room. It was essentially a marketplace or exchange for short-term housing for the medical community, initially for med students, now for traveling nurses and even physicians coming from abroad and things like that.
It's been an example of the joy I've gotten from creating something from scratch and seeing it thrive and used in the real world. Now it's a well-established platform used by every medical school in the country. Trevor, it's wonderful to hear that you used it yourself. But perhaps even more compelling is that it's used by visiting physicians from over 100 countries across the globe and has become a real centerpiece for the medical community. So although it in some ways feels like a footnote, it is one of the things I'm most proud of.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's fantastic. And I personally did not use it, although I will tell you that I'm a huge squash player and something that I enjoy doing. So I can imagine that your classmates really appreciated you building the ladder and enabling finding a match quickly. It's hard enough to make time for things, but to coordinate across a whole class, I'm sure that was quite a challenge that you solved for. The other thing that I read about in your background is the Qpid Health experience. Can you give us a little bit more information about that and how that helped you transition into future roles as well?
Harnessing NLP in the EMR: The Qpid Health Story
Dr. Gaurav Singal: This echoes the same theme of my core: I've always wanted to build things. The story here is interesting. I actually applied to radiology for residency. And as many of you may know, radiology residency is preceded by a year of internship. I ended up doing medicine internship at Mass General and was slated to do radiology residency as well at MGH.
During my internship, I quickly fell in love with internal medicine. By that point, I had known that I would be a part-time physician and a majority-time entrepreneur. And the reason to be a part-time physician at all was that I felt that there was a real joy and something unique about practicing medicine, that although my heart was in entrepreneurship and technology, there was something unique that was complementary in being a practicing clinician. So during my internship, it became clear to me that that path made more sense through internal medicine, which obviously is more patient-facing and I found quite compelling.
But I'd had this contract through the match, which many of you probably are familiar with, to complete at least one year of my radiology residency that they would not allow me to get out of, which is a longer story. And so I ended up doing a year of radiology residency, but like many things, you can pick the dots in retrospect and it ended up being an incredibly serendipitous experience. I really enjoyed my time in radiology and was treated, I thought, remarkably by the MGH radiology faculty, all of whom knew that I was leaving after a year but treated me like any other resident and taught me a tremendous amount about imaging.
But also, I met an amazing group that was building—this was back in 2010—a natural language processing platform for the electronic medical record. At the time, MGH did not have Epic. It had a homegrown EMR. And so there was a different level of access that was possible. This intrepid group out of the radiology department had built an infrastructure that tapped into the raw electronic medical record data store. And on top of that, had built a system, an operating system, if you will, using regular expressions. And anybody who spent time in natural language processing, they laugh at me for calling that NLP. But nevertheless, it was a system by which one could extract concepts of importance from the raw and unstructured data of the note and then present them to the providers.
The radiologists had built this because, as many of you know, in radiology, one is presented with an image with often limited context of that patient's history and asked to interpret its clinical significance. And one may be looking at a liver that looks abnormal, but not knowing if they've been on hepatotoxic meds or have had radiation or were stabbed in the liver 10 years ago, that clinical history may be important, but buried and not available. So it was, again, as many inventions are, born out of necessity.
And so this radiology group had built this platform for radiologists. And here I was, having completed a year of medicine in this interim year of radiology, but intending to go back and be an internist. It felt like there was an opportunity for me to translate what I thought was a pretty compelling technology to a different application space, i.e., internal medicine. And so I spent a good chunk of that year working on that problem, had the benefit of support from this group that had developed this technology, and also the head of quality and safety at MGH who had become a mentor who helped me secure a small amount of funding from the hospital and use that to fund an engineer and some other implementation staff.
So long story short, I got to spend a year while studying radiology, also building, essentially, a translation of this platform for internal medicine. By the end of that year, we had created a system, again, back in 2010, that used natural language processing in a validated way. I had also built a system to train and validate queries against the gold standard data set to characterize the performance of each of these NLP queries such that they could be used for clinical use. And indeed they were.
What we did was we built a dashboard that on an automated basis conducted a complete chart biopsy of every patient admitted to the Mass General and the Brigham and Women's Hospital and presented it in a dashboard for the admitting provider or the intern taking care of that patient or the transferring doctor in the ICU. It would show them the full medical history of that patient in a format that was easily accessible. So for example, if you're admitting a patient who's anticoagulated, you could figure out why they got started on anticoagulation. Or if you're admitting a patient for heart failure, it would tell you their dry weight and their home diuretic regimen and their inpatient diuretic regimen. Or if you're discharging a-patient, it would tell you any notes that indicated something that should be followed up at discharge or labs that were pending and a whole host of other things. The ejection fraction history over time extracted from notes and different formats of echoes.
It was pretty remarkable because it felt like, like many entrepreneurs, I could see the problem because I was living the problem and had the ability to create the system to solve it, which felt like a real gift and an opportunity. And on the side of it, just the last point on Qpid, I also built a system to do automated chart reviews for retrospective research. My wife at the time, who was a GI fellow, her fellowship project, which was supposed to take two years, was to build a database of eosinophilic esophagitis, and she used this system to build her database in two weeks. And then we got to spend the next two years enjoying her now newly freed up fellowship time. So there were lots of fringe benefits also in addition to just having a tremendous amount of fun building it.
Dr. Tim Showalter: The amount of time saving there is remarkable. And it's interesting to think through that use case because I can imagine that there likely are clinical stories where you're actually making sure that some overworked physician is being surfaced the correct information that's needed to make the right medical decisions for that patient. So kudos to you for that. And then what was the outcome of Qpid Health? Was that, as I recall reading, there was an acquisition ultimately, is that correct?
Dr. Gaurav Singal: So Qpid spun out and progressed as an independent company, which I was not involved with. I was involved only while I was at MGH. But like many things in healthcare, and I think all of you will appreciate this, it found its home where it was closest to financial impact. And so it ended up being used primarily for medical coding, as I understand. I didn't follow its journey super closely after that. But it was acquired ultimately, I believe. So, a decent outcome.
For me, though, I think you'd asked the question how it impacted my trajectory. For all of these things, it gave me a platform to create and build. For me, Qpid was a particular turning point because it was the first time until that point in my career that I was involved in creating something in which I wasn't the principal engineer, which was the right thing to do. My engineering at that time was quite rusty and instead I got to hire the services of a professional software developer and through that person ended up being able to create something far more robust with longevity and security and reliability and all the things that go along with production software.
For me, it was important because it gave me exposure to what's possible by levering up, and also to confirm that I still felt the joy of creation, even if I wasn't the person with hands on keyboard. In this case, I got to scratch that itch because the retrospective research platform I did develop myself. But the clinical platform that went into production, which probably had far more demand for reliability and uptime and all those things, that was developed by a professional software engineer.
That was one important takeaway from that experience. The second one, and I share this experience a lot with folks who want to transition out of a medical career into industry, especially in a more technical domain, is that I think it gave me some bona fides when I came to technology. When I came to the entrepreneurial world, interested now in a full-time career after residency, I could point to something that I'd created that had measurable impact and real adoption and use, which I think is hard when you're on the medical journey. As all of you know, it is really a train you get on. And then it's a pretty intense experience from undergrad to medical school, to residency, to sometimes post-residency training with fellowships or sub-fellowships that both doesn't provide a lot of time and also provides a pretty linear path.
At the end of that, if one wants to go into industry doing something other than direct research in clinical development or as a medical director, which may be more translatable directly from the clinical or physician scientist experience, it's different. For myself, wanting to be more on the technology side, ultimately through product management, having something I could point to there, I think was really helpful for others to have a point of validation that I did have skills that were transferable beyond clinical practice and scientific research. That experience, I think, ended up being really important for the rest of my career.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: So let's jump ahead to where you started to apply some of that experience at Foundation Medicine. We'd love to hear some of your journey there. What were some of the key lessons for early stage health tech leaders on scaling business and health technology all the way up through, as much as you can talk about, how things unfolded for the Roche acquisition.
Building a Data Powerhouse at Foundation Medicine
Dr. Gaurav Singal: First of all, it was without a doubt the defining experience of my professional journey. And I think the biggest lesson is, pick the right company at the right time, which is obviously easier said than done. But that's where I found myself and had an incredible experience as a result. The story there briefly, I was introduced to Foundation Medicine while I was a senior resident at Mass General by a number of friends and mentors who were involved. Alexis Borisy had been one of my mentors at Third Rock Ventures, and he had founded the company, was serving at the time as CEO, and was about to transition to chairman. And Krishna Yeshwant and Anthony Philippakis were both very heavily involved. Krishna was on the board. Anthony was a very deep friend of the family. Both of them had been med students with me and were friends and mentors as well.
All of them saw something really special in that company back in 2013 and encouraged me basically not to look anywhere else. So I mostly did not look anywhere else and ended up joining Foundation Medicine part-time as a senior resident and then full-time after I graduated, largely just on their compelling testimony, if you will, and advice. And maybe that's a lesson in and of itself. One can only, especially that early in one's career, figure out the right place to go. And when everybody and people you respect are telling you to go to a place, that's probably a good signal.
So I joined Foundation Medicine at the time, a hundred-person company had just, I think, completed the development of Foundation One, which was the first scaled NGS assay in oncology and was a really complex thing to bring to market as a diagnostic. Every single person was burning midnight oil, getting the diagnostic live and into cancer patients' hands. At the same time, the founders and leaders and board members of the company all felt that there was going to be a really important part of the story that was related to data, which in 2013 was completely non-obvious. And so I was brought into the company mostly to start to incubate that, largely future vision at the time, that we should be thinking about the role that data will play in Foundation Medicine's story. That's what I came to do as an N of One, sitting in a corner of the company, working on this idea. I had a remarkable boss and mentor in Steve Kafka, who was the president and COO of the company, who really believed in this mission and opportunity and gave me a ton of space and leeway to go explore it and develop it.
Over the next several years with a few partners within the company, I started to flesh out the vision for what ultimately became the data business of Foundation Medicine and started to build a team around it. Ultimately what it ended up being, for me, I spent seven, eight years there and over the course of that, we have so many different chapters from an EIR incubating a new effort within, at the time, still a relatively small company that was relatively new to the whole ecosystem, to building essentially a mini tech company within a life sciences company and understanding all the cultural dynamics that happen between two very different ways of operating a business. We built a data science group, built a data engineering team, built a design team, built a product management team. The latter two at the time were very new to life sciences.
We created a number of data businesses that now maybe feel more commonplace, but at the time were all relatively new. The first was a real-world data business in which we harnessed our genomic data but linked it with clinical data from Flatiron Health, which some of you are very familiar with. We did that through, at the time, a relatively novel process of privacy-preserving record linkage through tokenization and de-identification. Now a household name with Datavant, but at the time, Datavant didn't even exist. We did it through a subsidiary of IMS. We created new methods, wrote about it a lot, worked with FDA on application spaces there and appropriate use for regulatory decision-making.
We built a clinical trials, matching and recruitment business that helped enroll a huge number of the patients for the NTRK inhibitor trials, which many of you are probably familiar with, among many others. I worked on novel trial designs, including at-home decentralized trial designs with Roche and Science 37. We built a clinical decision support business that used real-world data to guide complex decision-making. We did some of the early work in digital pathology, some of which was with PathAI. We built the early blueprints for a biobank using residual samples.
So if I look back on my time, it's hard to imagine really any other place I could have been to work on such compelling problems, to be able to create from whole cloth new business lines that many of which I feel were new to the whole world, let alone Foundation Medicine. And to get to do so with such a broad range of interesting ideas. Again, I picked the place because people I respected told me to go there and in retrospect could not imagine another place that I could have had such a wonderful and life-changing experience. So I could speak about that for hours and I will stop there. But needless to say, could not imagine my career being what it is without that.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I think the way that you're describing creating business lines around the data is, you packed in a lot of innovation there, from the clinical genomic database to a lot of the trial design work. It's pretty remarkable what was accomplished by that team during that era. I'm curious, thinking about a lot of our listeners who are early in their clinical careers or are just starting to think about entrepreneurship within healthcare. Thinking back on your experiences, particularly your impressive track record with Foundation Medicine, what advice would you give to young people who are just starting out?
Advice for the Next Generation of Physician Innovators
Dr. Gaurav Singal: I can't say I planned much of this. So I have an N of one experience that I really enjoyed and have grown from and have loved almost every step of my career so far and hopefully will continue to going forward. I think the thing that I found the most compelling and probably the most helpful for me was to find opportunities to build things. I highlight that specifically because, as you all know, the academic journey is generally focused more on learning and studying as both a student and a scientist. And that is not always the mode of operating outside of the academy's walls.
For me, for example—you've asked this question multiple times—at different times in my life I've had an opportunity to build things, whether it was completely on my own and off the side of my desk or somewhat more formally like the Qpid experience. I think the opportunity to build both confirms one's interest, almost like volunteering as a pre-med student, that this is something that is exciting to you and is what you want to do with your career. So it's an important part of one's self-discovery journey, but also I think is an important signal to a would-be hiring manager that that's the right fit for you. It also gives an opportunity to demonstrate agency and the ability to have impact in a real, ideally measurable way.
So the advice I always give, which is sometimes easier said than done, is to find opportunities to build. And by the way, that can be within academic institutions. Especially as a medical trainee, it's not often the case that you have a lot of access outside of the institution in which you're studying or training. But I think there are opportunities if one looks and finds them to create and build and operate within those organizations. My general advice is to seek out, find, and pursue those opportunities over maybe more traditional opportunities to do traditional research and publish, because I think those are complementary experiences and maybe even more important if you want to have that type of a career outside of the institutions that you trained in.
Dr. Trevor Royce: You hit the timing with Foundation perfectly, and it was so related to your experience in life to that date that what I'm hearing on my side is it was a really good fit at the right time, and the productivity that resulted from that is inherent in it. I guess as we wrap up, we, number one, just scratched the surface on the Foundation Medicine story. So it sounds like we're going to have another Gaurav podcast in our future, which will be amazing.
Dr. Gaurav Singal: Would love to be back. Thank you.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Number two, before we wrap up, what are you working on these days and what do the next five years look like for Gaurav?
The Next Frontier: Bringing AI to the Clinical Bedside
Dr. Gaurav Singal: Probably the same for all of you. The last couple of years have been feeling like a kid in the candy shop with the explosion of capability on the AI front. And I went to undergrad wanting to work on circuit boards and came out being enthralled with AI and machine intelligence and machine vision. And at the time, it was a shadow of what's possible now. Part of why I went to medical school is it felt like there were applications of technology and data science and computer science to healthcare that would be really compelling. In some ways, the other part of the story that we haven't talked about is the story of the last 20 years of my career trying to find ways for AI to infiltrate clinical practice, which has always felt to me, in some ways, hamstrung by human computation.
Many of you have experienced this, I'm sure, in your careers. We have so many reductive scoring systems that allow us to risk stratify and make clinical decisions for patients because we're forced to do those in our heads as human physicians. And all of this is to say that it feels like we're finally entering the era where AI really has the opportunity to turbocharge physicians, not just in the research side, not just in coding as Qpid ultimately did, not just in drug development, which is obviously incredibly important, but in the practice of clinical medicine.
I still see patients a few weeks a year as an internal medicine doc, and every time I'm on service, I'm reminded that there are helpless opportunities for AI to make clinical care better. That's been hamstrung, I think, by technology, certainly by the culture of medicine and the role technology plays in the patient-provider interaction, and then, of course, by business models and the independent sustainability of these opportunities. My view is in the last decade, all three of those have changed dramatically.
So to answer your question, what do the next five years look like? I hope the next five years look like bringing AI to the clinical bedside. And I don't think there's ever been a time as compelling as now. Maybe it's not even been possible until now in a really meaningful way. Many of you are working on this problem already. And I think the next five years will be an opportunity to bring the AI co-pilot to the clinical arena in a way that has never been possible before. I think the net will be a dramatic improvement in patient outcomes and real financial impact for every sector of the healthcare ecosystem. And so that's what I'm quite focused on over the next few years and hope to play a really big role in.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Well, thank you, Gaurav, for joining us. It's been really interesting to hear about your own personal journey. So thank you so much for coming on.
Dr. Gaurav Singal: Thanks so much for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation.
