On February 8, the American Council on Germany, Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Center for Research and Innovation New York, and the Hasso Plattner Institut will host a discussion and reception with Professor Ariel D. Stern, Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Digital Health, Economics, and Policy at the Hasso Plattner Institute, Full Professor at the University of Potsdam, and Poronui Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; and moderated by Dr. Thomas J. Fuchs, Co-Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, Dean of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Health, and Professor of Computational Pathology and Computer Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
New medical technologies have saved and improved millions of lives in recent decades. Yet the digital technologies that are transforming contemporary health care, such as digital medical devices, applications of medical software, and artificial intelligence tools to diagnose and treat patients, would be unrecognizable to the 20th-century architects of our regulatory and healthcare delivery institutions. For example, many digital health applications (apps) meet the formal definition of a medical device, yet their fully software-based nature means that established practices for evaluating their safety and efficacy are incompatible with the dynamic nature of the apps themselves. The quickly transforming scientific and technological foundations of medical invention—combined with the rapid pace of innovation—no longer fit our existing institutional structures. This mismatch underlies many of today’s challenges in commercializing new products and creates significant bottlenecks for incorporating new innovations into care delivery. Professor Stern’s presentation will focus on how the development and adoption of healthcare technology are shaped by the interaction between healthcare innovators, regulators, and healthcare delivery institutions. She will also present policy and business model innovations that address key challenges to technology adoption in this setting.
Dr. Ariel Dora Stern is the Poronui Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School and a Faculty Member of the Harvard-MIT Center for Regulatory Science. Her research focuses on technology management and innovation in health care, using methods from econometrics and data science to curate and analyze novel datasets. Her projects consider the regulation, strategy, and economics of healthcare, focusing on emerging healthcare technologies and delivery modalities. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard, where she was a National Bureau of Economic Research Predoctoral Fellow in the Economics of Health and Aging. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Dartmouth College, where she was a Presidential Scholar. From 2020 to 2021, Dr. Stern served as the Director for International Health Care Economics at the Health Innovation Hub, an independent think tank of the German Federal Ministry of Health focused on digital transformation projects. In April 2024, she is slated to assume a chair at the Hasso Plattner Institute, where she has been named an Alexander von Humboldt Professor.
Dr. Stern’s research focuses on technology management and innovation in health care. Her projects consider the regulation, strategy, and economics of health care, focusing on understanding the drivers of new product development among firms and the determinants of how new medical technologies are adopted and used in practice. Stern is particularly interested in the intersection of the regulation, firm strategy, and economics of healthcare. She also researches the digital transformation of medical technology and healthcare delivery, investigating the policy, business, and managerial questions raised by the growth of digital health and the digital transformation of medicine. Her research has been cited by Bloomberg, the New York Times, and National Public Radio.
Dr. Thomas J. Fuchs is a scientist in the groundbreaking field of Computational Pathology, focused on using artificial intelligence to analyze images of tissue samples to identify disease, recommend treatment, and predict outcomes. In October 2020, he was appointed Co-Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, Dean of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Health, and Professor of Computational Pathology and Computer Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In this role, he leads the next generation of scientists and clinicians using artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop novel diagnostic tools and treatments for acute and chronic diseases.
Dr. Fuchs’s work includes developing novel methods for the analysis of digital microscopy slides to better understand genetic mutations and their influence on changes in tissues. He has been recognized for developing large-scale systems for mapping the pathology, origins, and progress of cancer. This breakthrough was achieved by building a high-performance computer cluster to train deep neural networks at petabyte scale.
Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Fuchs was Director of the Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Graduate School for Medical Sciences. At MSK, he led a laboratory focused on computational pathology and medical machine learning. Dr. Fuchs co-founded Paige, in 2017, which, under his tenure, became a leader in the field of digital pathology. He is a former research technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a visiting scientist at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Fuchs holds a Doctor of Sciences in Machine Learning from ETH Zurich and an MS in Technical Mathematics from the Graz Technical University in Austria.