Mount Sinai creates Chief Data Officer role, appoints Kasarskis

New York City’s largest integrated delivery system is looking to put its healthcare data front and center in its efforts to improve patient care with the creation of a new executive-level position.

Mount Sinai Health System announced on Wednesday that Andrew Kasarskis, an internationally recognized expert in biomedical data, has been named executive vice president and chief data officer.

“The CDO position will play a crucial role in continuously advancing Mount Sinai’s capabilities for our patients and the entire healthcare system,” said Kenneth Davis, MD, president and CEO of the Mount Sinai Health System.

“We knew we needed a leader with deep expertise in the development of medical and research technologies that can harness information and deliver invaluable insights into the genetics and pathology of diseases, which is a rare combination of expertise to find,” Davis added. “We are excited about Dr. Kasarskis’s vision to encourage more data-driven commercial partnerships, spinoffs and patient initiatives to address healthcare needs.”

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According to Mount Sinai, Kasarskis will spearhead leveraging the healthcare organization’s digital assets to include supporting entrepreneurial activities at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, as well as adopting key performance metrics to measure infrastructure improvements and data-driven projects.

“The addition of this role at Mount Sinai provides an exceptional opportunity to strengthen our healthcare system’s overall data literacy and culture,” said Kasarskis. “I want everyone here to view the vast data available to us as an asset we can use objectively to improve efficiency and quality of care, identify patient cohorts for groundbreaking research, enhance the education we provide trainees through the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and add value to all of our organizational efforts.”

Previously, Kasarskis served as director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine. While he has stepped down from those roles, Kasarskis will remain a professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and will continue to conduct research in the development and application of technology in areas such as pathogen surveillance, pharmacogenomics, viral infections, and chronic disease.

“By building a data-driven environment where we can assess hospital initiatives for impact, we can achieve a much faster loop to identify treatment-related issues and opportunities, access the necessary data to address them, conceptualize interventions that have the potential to deliver positive patient outcomes, and realize the benefits more quickly and to a much greater extent than was previously possible,” added Kasarskis.