The Resonance Test 3: John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks

John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, says “the very containers” that we used to put data in, “that kept it human-scale,” have been “blown to bits.” The question is: How do we pick up the pieces and reassemble them in the aftermath? In this "Resonance Test" podcast, Wilbanks and Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley dive down into the many issues surrounding healthcare data. “We basically throw darts at the dartboard with a blindfold on right now," says Wilbanks. “Using data, statistical modeling, and machine learning *has* to be better than that.” Together, Wilbanks and Dunkley talk about smartphones and increasing sample size in health research, the idea of a “credit union” for data, and the challenge of measuring the success of precision medicine. The work is, for the passionate Wilbanks, a very human-centric activity. “Health is personal," he says. "Experience of disease is personal. Lived experience is personal, and you can start to capture these lived experiences and aggregate them in ways that tell us a lot about disease that we didn’t used to know.”