Leo Celi, MD, is striving to advance precision medicine. Can he help transform healthcare?
AN AWAKENING CAN COME IN A FLASH, or it can occur over years, as dogma gradually breaks down in the face of data. For Leo Anthony Celi, MD, there was never a “eureka moment,” as he puts it, during his journey from studying medicine in the Philippines to becoming clinical research director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory of Computational Physiology. Instead, it took rigorous training, along with extensive experience in clinical practice, before he recognized that the art of medicine can be woefully unscientific.
That concept is made possible by electronic medical records (EMRs) and made impossible, for now, by the widespread reluctance to share patient data. One remarkable exception is being modeled by the lab at MIT where Celi works, using data from the ICU at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he practices. The lab compiled elaborate data from more than 50,000 hospital admissions and has made the database accessible, for free, to thousands of investigators and students around the world. Granted, nobody can form conclusive insights by studying a decade’s worth of patient data from 1 unit at 1 hospital, but the database has been an amazing resource for exploring research questions and—more important—demonstrating how big data and machine learning could radically augment the wisdom behind treatment decisions.
From residents at Beth Israel Deaconess to professors at MIT, people who know Celi rave about his ability to facilitate collaboration among clinicians, data scientists, engineers, statisticians, and whoever else is needed for a project to succeed. In the ICU, he learned how the wellbeing of patients depends on a “collaborative culture,” he says. That’s also the only way forward to healthcare’s holy grail.