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Paul Bleicher is an investor, consultant and advisor to healthcare and life science businesses, internationally. He participates in private equity investments in healthcare and life science IT/data as an executive partner at Ardan Equity and with startup companies through his work as a Founding Pillar at Pillar.

Prior to these roles, he was the chief executive officer of OptumLabs, an open, collaborative research and innovation center founded by Optum and Mayo Clinic to accelerate improvements in patient care and value through clinical, policy and product innovation driven by new insights from big data.

Before OptumLabs, he was chief medical officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Humedica, a next-generation clinical informatics company that was acquired by Optum in January 2013. Before Humedica, Dr. Bleicher was a founder and original CEO of Phase Forward, a company which pioneered the development of web-based electronic data capture for clinical trials and was acquired by Oracle Corporation in 2010. He had previously led clinical development at a biotechnology company (Alpha-Beta Technology), and began his career in industry at PAREXEL, where he assisted pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies with the clinical development of novel therapies.

Dr. Bleicher earned his BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MD/PhD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He trained in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital, in dermatology at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in molecular biology before beginning his career as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has held various leadership positions and has received numerous awards for entrepreneurship and leadership in the pharmaceutical and health care industries.

Isaac “Zak” Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural chair of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, whose mission is to develop the methods, tools, and infrastructure required for a new generation of scientists and care providers to move biomedicine rapidly forward by taking advantage of the insight and precision offered by big data. Kohane develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales, from whole health care systems to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment.

He also has worked on AI applications in medicine since the 1990’s, including automated ventilator control, pediatric growth monitoring, detection of domestic abuse, diagnosing autism from multimodal data and most recently assisting clinicians using whole genome sequence and clinical histories to diagnose rare or unknown disease patients.

His most urgent question is how to enable doctors to be most effective and enjoy their profession when they enter into a substantial symbiosis with machine intelligence. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American College of Medical Informatics.