While digital health offers many clear promises and opportunities, the complexities are real and oftentimes foreign to traditional healthcare. Deriving value for patients, clinicians and institutions requires mixing technology, medicine, basic science and the internet, the clinic environment and the home environment, and much more. In this talk, Eric Perakslis and Dr. Megan Ranney, Academic Dean of the School of Public Health, discuss the 10 emerging “toxicities” of digital health and how they can be mitigated and managed with a specific focus on health equity.

This event was cosponsored by OVPR, the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health and the Brown Data Science Initiative.

Speaker Bios

Eric Perakslis is the chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute and professor of population health sciences and chief technology strategist at the Duke University School of Medicine. Previously, Perakslis was a Rubenstein Fellow at Duke University, where his work focused on collaborative efforts in data science that spanned medicine, policy, engineering, computer science, information technology and security.

Prior to Duke, Perakslis served as chief scientific advisor at Datavant, lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and strategic innovation advisor to Médecins Sans Frontières, as well as in roles with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals and ArQule Inc.

Perakslis has a Ph.D. in chemical and biochemical engineering from Drexel University. He also holds BSChE and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering.

Megan Ranney is a practicing emergency physician, researcher and advocate for innovative approaches to health. Her work focuses on the intersection between digital health, violence prevention and population health.

Ranney is the founding director of the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health, the academic dean for the Brown University School of Public Health and the Warren Alpert Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Rhode Island Hospital/Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is an editor for the journal Annals of Emergency Medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Ranney has a B.S. in history of science from Harvard University, an M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and an MPH from Brown University.