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brandonb
9,344karma·1,335submissions·January 17, 2011
about
Data for good.
Co-Founder at Empirical Health (https://empirical.health). Don't die of heart disease.
Before: Co-Founder @ Cardiogram (ML for heart health)
CTO at Sift Science (YC S11, machine learning to fight fraud)
Data Science @ UCSF Cardiology
HealthCare.gov rescue team
Google (Android speech recognition, search ads ML)
brandonb.cc
recent activity (1,335 total)
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Hey all—OP here. I'm working on developing Cardiogram, the Apple Watch app from which this data is derived, and working with UCSF cardiology doing machine learning on heart rate data. Feel free t…
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What a cool project! I'm working with UCSF cardiology on various projects involving Apple Watch's heart rate sensor, and here are a few applications you might consider for your technology: …
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Yep. I think there's room for scientists, engineers, and designers to contribute, but you have to publish peer-reviewed studies showing hard outcomes. Secrecy doesn't work in medicine.
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Sure. I'm brandon@cardiogr.am.
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If you're a digital health entrepreneur and treating what's happening with Theranos as a wakeup call to do rigorous science, you could do worse than to work with the UCSF Center for Digital …
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Yes—Apple Watch records your heart rate every 10 minutes during the day, and every five seconds when you put it in workout mode. For example, here's what my heart rate looked like during the Game…
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I used to be on the hiring committee at Google, and sometimes we'd ask for extra interviews if the person was very strong, but feedback was mixed in a particular area. For example, if a candidate…
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FYI, the new vets.gov is a collaboration between the US Digital Service, one of the startups that came out of healthcare.gov (Ad Hoc LLC), the VA, and others: https://adhocteam.us/
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It's possible you saw a different company's web site--Ginkgo Bioworks is a synthetic biology company:
http://ginkgobioworks.com/ …
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One of the biggest barriers to preventative healthcare is that it doesn't pay -- at least not quickly enough to make business sense for an insurer. There's a famous paper that looked for cos…
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I always recommend the book "Leading Snowflakes" for new technical leads or engineering managers: http://leadingsnowflakes.com
It gives very concrete advice, and it explains…
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Emergency care is only about 2-8% of healthcare costs. Most of what we spend on healthcare is for chronic conditions that you have for years, decades, or your lifetime. @waynemr's comment gets it…
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I worked with a couple of the Insight Data Fellows mentioned in this blog post, on the UCSF Health eHeart study. Mike Klein (Fitbit data to predict heart failure) and Yancheng Liu (Apple Watch data to…
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In the limit, I think you might reach the Affordable Care Act: a single risk pool for each region, and price variations only on age and smoking status.
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This is a really good podcast--I love the idea of progressive equity, and Ben and Andrew do such a thorough job of talking through the implications on employee motivation, secondary sales, pro-rata vs…
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I'd recommend either Nava (navahq.com) or the USDS reserves ( https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser... ).…
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The other reports suffer from the same problem -- they're focused on whether paperwork was filled out correctly. That's not what killed the project. To the extent these reports are read, I t…
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The US Digital Service started with healthcare.gov, but nowadays they work across the government on projects that matter to people all over the political spectrum: VA, immigration, department of educa…
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Hey HN! I worked on the "tech surge" to save healthcare.gov, and as many of you have noticed, this report gets everything backwards. A 96-hour training course would not have saved healthcare…
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Joyce and Karthik are awesome, I love their vision to make compound interest a thing of the past.