We’re excited to announce the formation of our Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and welcome inaugural members, including Robert Kaplan, PhD, Jeffrey Brown, PhD, and Milena Gianfrancesco, PhD, MPH. The SAB will work closely with PicnicHealth’s leadership team as the company expands into new disease areas and enhances its data pipeline to deliver regulatory-grade real-world evidence to the life sciences community.

PicnicHealth was founded to help patients with chronic or complex illnesses gain control of their medical records so they can more effectively navigate their healthcare journeys. Over the years, we have helped to make medical records more accessible and complete for over tens of thousands of patients by collecting and organizing medical information from doctors, EMRs and other systems of records throughout the United States. By working directly with patients, we are able to build patient-centered real-world datasets that give a complete view of each patient’s healthcare journey. With the launch of our Research Platform in 2020, we are now providing these rich, complete datasets to the larger life sciences research community.

“We could not be more excited to have Bob Kaplan, Jeff Brown, and Milena Gianfrancesco joining the PicnicHealth Scientific Advisory Board. Each member brings a wealth of experience and expertise that will help dramatically accelerate PicnicHealth's vision of empowering patient-centric real-world research,” said Dan Drozd, MD, Chief Medical Officer of PicnicHealth. “We plan to leverage the expertise of the board to help advise company leadership on key strategic decisions, provide scientific advice and validation, and prioritization of our long term roadmap to expand our business and bring real world evidence to patients, providers, and regulators more quickly.”

The founding members of the PicnicHealth Scientific Advisory Board are:

Robert Kaplan, PhD is currently a faculty member at the Stanford School of Medicine, Clinical Excellence Research Center and a Distinguished Research Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Fielding School of Public Health. Kaplan served as the former associate director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) leading the Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research during the Obama administration and a former chief science officer for the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Kaplan is the author of “More than Medicine: The Broken Promise of American Health.”

Jeffrey Brown, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Population Medicine (DPM) at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. He holds leadership roles in the FDA’s Sentinel System, PCORnet, the Biologics and Biosimilars Collective Intelligence Consortium (BBCIC), and the Innovation in Medical Evidence and Development Surveillance (IMEDS) program. His primary research activities involve new approaches to facilitate large-scale multi-institutional research through the use of distributed health data networks to support a learning health system. Dr. Brown is the inventor of PopMedNet, an open-source software platform that facilitates creation and operation of distributed health data networks. Dr. Brown holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Tufts University and a PhD in Social Policy from Brandeis University.

Milena Gianfrancesco, PhD, MPH is an AssistantProfessor in the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She is an autoimmune disease epidemiologist supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, researching genetic big data analytics, machine learning, and causal inference. Her current research includes analysis of electronic medical record data in individual prescribed immunosuppressive medications.

We look forward to working with our SAB to continue to advance and innovate PicnicHealth’s product offerings.