Title: Transformational Opportunities for Healthcare enabled by Information Technology

Speaker: Manish Gupta, Xerox Research

Abstract: The healthcare industry across the world sees a clear need to contain rapidly rising costs while improving the quality of healthcare. Emerging markets like India face an additional challenge of an acute shortage of qualified doctors and additional healthcare staff. Information technology can enable a dramatic transformation of the industry through a shift from reactive treatment to proactive action across different tiers of the healthcare system, including hospitals and primary healthcare centers, extensions to home monitoring and care, and also wellness programs that lead to healthier lives. We present examples across the spectrum of healthcare services. We show a state-of-the-art machine learning technique to predict a kind of serious complication, namely, acute hypotensive episodes for patients in an intensive care unit (ICU). We then show how analytics over electronic medical records can improve the accuracy in predicting the probability of a patient requiring ICU admission, which can enable a hospital to take proactive action before the patient turns serious. We describe another technique to support assessment of strokes, which exemplifies how information technology can be applied to facilitate triage and greater shift towards primary healthcare centers. Finally, we present preliminary work that shows the ability to non-invasively measure, through cameras, body vitals such as respiration and heart rate, and also to diagnose diseases such as breast cancer and atrial fibrillation (a form of cardiac arrhythmia). We describe outstanding challenges, related to both information technology and business model, which need to be overcome to achieve the outlined vision of transformational impact.

Bio: Dr. Manish Gupta is Vice President at Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India. Previously, Manish has served as Managing Director, Technology Division at Goldman Sachs India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. From 2001 to 2006, he served as a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish holds a B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from IIT Delhi, a Masters degree from the Ohio State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has co-authored about 75 papers, with more than 5,500 citations in Google Scholar in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi.