Isaac Kohane
What unique skills and/or talents do you bring to your job?
When I think about uniqueness in individuals, I think about all the experiences they share and those that they do not. As we add more and more experiences over our lifetime, the intersection across all these experiences in two individuals becomes vanishingly small so that no two individuals have identical experiences, even if they are genetically identical. So even if genetics play a significant part of defining our identity and skills, the many dimensions of our experience confer uniqueness that is very hard to predict in advance. In that respect, the relatively rare combination of experiences I bring to the job is precisely that combination which I hope to make much more common in medicine.
That is, I have been privileged to have had a wonderful education in computer science as well as in the art of medicine, and further had the opportunity to pursue research in both those domains. Those experiences color how I see the future of progress in medicine: data driven, patient-focused, and integrative in the use of all available data reaching considerably beyond the narrow patient-physician encounter.
What is the significance of the object you brought with you to the photo shoot?
This clinical white coat which I was so proud to receive, at the start of a brief period many years ago when I became a "clinical attending," now reminds me of several secular trends that have transformed the practice of medicine. First, the sartorial distinction it makes does not jive with the narrowing gap between clinical expertise and the expertise of activated patients. Second, the tools commonly carried around in clinical white coats remind me of the growing gap between how we currently interact with patients and how much more we could do if we were equipped with the latest tools in portable imaging, diagnostics and decision support. Third of all, lam reminded how this coat and thousands others like it may have been unwitting transporters of infection from one patient to another if only because it was changed and washed much less often than our daily clothes. In short, it's a reminder that not all medical traditions are necessarily worth retaining.