Biography

Roni Zeiger, former Chief Health Strategist at Google, works at the cutting edge of technology, healthcare and user-centered design. At Google, he developed innovative digital medical services like online medical records, Google Flu Trends, and Symptom Search. Now Roni is leading a company called Smart Patients, a peer support network for patients and families. The network also helps healthcare organizations create more patient-centered services. Roni's experience in digital health makes him one of the foremost speakers on how the internet is transforming modern healthcare. He designed Google Health, a system of patient-managed online personal health records where patients could access, update, and share their data with caregivers and institutions. Although this project is no longer active, Roni's experiments are still used as models for the future of health records. Google Flu Trends re-imagined how we gather medical information and track diseases. Flu Trends monitors the spread of the flu around the United States by analyzing flu-related searches on Google. Its results usually match those of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and are available weeks before the official numbers. It's an example of the role online innovation can play in making healthcare more efficient. If these digital advances make up one side of the new world of networks, then patient expertise is the other. Patients today are bringing their intelligence and passion to bear on the conditions that affect them. They have powerful online tools at their disposal, such as those Roni helped build at Google. They now also form remarkable networks where they share their knowledge with other patients. Sometimes, they learn more about a niche topic than most clinicians: they become micro-experts. Roni sees these micro-experts as a valuable new resource for the medical community, and one that raises many questions: How can we leverage the knowledge of connected patients to complement the expertise of providers and combat the misinformation often found online? How can patients help us deliver more patient-centered care and design more patient-centered clinical trials? Roni answers these questions and many others to help organizations embrace practical and user-centered technology. Dr. Zeiger, a practicing physician, earned his M.D. at Stanford University and completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He has served as a clinical instructor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and received a master's degree in biomedical informatics from Stanford.

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