Dr. Gaurav Singal: A Physician Innovator on Data and AI

HealthTech Remedy

Is a detailed career plan the key to success, or is the secret to follow your curiosity and build what's missing in the world? In this episode of HealthTech Remedy, we explore the nontraditional career path of a true physician innovator, Dr. Gaurav Singal. He shares why abandoning a rigid plan in favor of serendipity and a passion for building led him from medicine to the forefront of health technology. This episode unpacks the story of a physician who has consistently identified problems in healthcare and built the technology to solve them, offering invaluable lessons for anyone looking to merge a clinical background with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Dr. Gaurav Singal's physician entrepreneur journey is a masterclass in applying technical skills to solve real-world medical challenges. He candidly shares his origin story, from an early love for computer science and robotics to a circuitous entry into medicine, not with a plan to practice, but to understand the human body as a machine that could be fixed with technology. This builder's mindset first emerged in medical school, where he created solutions for his peers out of necessity, most notably the platform Rotating Room - a marketplace for short-term housing for medical students and professionals that is now used by every medical school in the country. We then dive into his experience at MGH building what would become Qpid Health, where he harnessed natural language processing (NLP) to extract critical, unstructured information from the electronic medical record (EMR), dramatically improving provider access to patient history and saving countless hours of manual chart review.

The core of our conversation explores Dr. Singal's defining role as Chief Data Officer at Foundation Medicine. He details the vision behind building the revolutionary Foundation Medicine real-world data platform, linking the world's largest cancer genomics dataset with clinical records from partners like Flatiron Health. This effort created the clinical genomic database, a powerful tool that accelerated research, enabled novel trial designs, and established new business lines in clinical trial matching and recruitment. Dr. Singal's story is a testament to the power of a physician innovator to create entirely new categories within a life sciences company. Looking to the future, he shares his excitement for what's next: bringing AI in clinical decision support directly to the bedside to turbocharge physicians and fundamentally improve patient outcomes.

About Our Guest:
Dr. Gaurav Singal is a practicing physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, and a technologist, executive, investor, and advisor in the health tech and biotech ecosystem. His career is distinguished by his role as Chief Data Officer at Foundation Medicine, where he built its pioneering real-world data platform. Dr. Singal’s journey showcases how a physician innovator can create transformative solutions, from early-stage ventures like Qpid Health to industry-defining data businesses. He continues to advise and invest in companies at the intersection of diagnostics, data science, and therapeutics.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Welcome to the Physician Innovator Series
(02:15) Dr. Gaurav Singal's Origin Story: From Computer Science to Medicine
(04:28) Career by Serendipity: Why Having No Plan Was an Advantage
(07:43) The Builder's Itch: How Personal Necessity Led to Creating Rotating Room
(13:09) The Qpid Health Story: Using NLP in the EMR to Solve Clinical Problems
(22:18) Joining Foundation Medicine: Building a Data Powerhouse
(25:58) Creating the Foundation Medicine Real-World Data Business
(28:31) Advice for the Next Generation of Physician Innovators
(31:14) The Next Frontier: Bringing AI to the Clinical Bedside