Dr. Jon G. Duke, M.D., joins GTRI as Georgia Tech’s director of Health Data Analytics. Duke previously served as director of Health Analytics and Advanced Text Mining at the Regenstrief Institute at Indiana University.

While at Regenstrief, he also lead the Drug Safety Informatics Lab as well as a 5-year partnership with Merck & Co, which conducted more than 45 projects involving at least 70 faculty and staff.

Duke will lead GTRI’s initiative to improve human health through better capture, interpretation, and applications of data. This effort will incorporate a spectrum of expertise including machine learning, natural language processing, high-performance computing, sensors, cybersecurity and health data interoperability. 

While applying advanced technology, these efforts will manifest through real-world projects supporting not only research environments but health care systems, government and industry partners, and community collaborators.

Duke’s previous work focused on advancing techniques for conducting research through structured, unstructured and patient-generated health care data, with applications spanning research, quality and clinical domains.

His areas of expertise include the following:

• Big data analytics and natural language processing in health care
• Structured and unstructured clinical phenotypes
• Drug safety and clinical decision support
• UI/UX (user-interface/user experience) design in health IT applications
• Academic-industry collaborations

Over the last several years, Duke has directed more than $21 million in data research for industry and government sponsors. He has worked to expand on strategies for capturing better health care data, streamlining insights for stakeholders and delivering effective data-based interventions.

In 2014, Duke helped found the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI, pronounced “Odyssey”) program, which aims to develop open-source solutions to deliver value in health data through large-scale analytics.

Duke received his bachelor’s in 1994 from Emory University, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2000. He completed his internal medicine residency with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in 2003. In 2010, he earned a master degree in human-computer interaction from Indiana University. During this same time (2008 to 2010) he had a Fellowship in Medical Informatics with the Regenstrief Institute.

Board certified in internal medicine since 2003, Duke served as an adjunct professor of medicine, an adjunct professor of informatics and an adjunct professor of knowledge informatics and translation at the Indiana School of Medicine from 2010 to 2014. He was a resident clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School from 2000 to 2003.

In addition to co-founding the OHDSI Collaborative, Duke is a member of the Health Information and Management Systems Society, the American Medical Informatics Association and the American College of Physicians.