#268 The Story of Amazon Web Services with Dr Taha Kass-Hout, Chief Medical Officer and Director of Machine Learning

This week, James is joined by Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, Chief Medical Officer and Director of Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services. Dr. Kass-Hout leads the Health AI strategy and efforts, including Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon HealthLake. He works with teams at Amazon responsible for developing the science, technology, and scale for COVID-19 lab testing, including Amazon’s first FDA authorization for testing our associates—now offered to the public for at-home testing. A physician and bioinformatician, Taha served two terms under President Obama, including the first Chief Health Informatics officer at the FDA. During this time as a public servant, he pioneered the use of emerging technologies and the cloud (the CDC’s electronic disease surveillance), and established widely accessible global data sharing platforms: the openFDA, which enabled researchers and the public to search and analyze adverse event data, and precisionFDA (part of the Presidential Precision Medicine initiative). Taha holds doctor of medicine and master of science in biostatistics degrees from the University of Texas and completed clinical training at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.