Considering Your Education for a Future in Health IT (Video Transcript)

Bill Russell (Interviewer): When I was going to school, they used to say, learn computers, learn a programming language…that kind of stuff back in the day. What would you say to those who are really getting ready to go into school, maybe undergraduate or looking for a focus now that they’re in school to take them into career if they’re looking at technology at this point?

David Ting (Tausight CTO and Founder): Wow. That’s a good question. I mentor a lot of entrepreneurs, both in school as well as startup companies, and it’s the same characteristic you look for.  You want to get into a field where you can leverage your entrepreneurial skills. And so to me, it is about understanding; does your school have an entrepreneurial program you can get into? Are there things that lead up to it? It could be in anything from pharma to biotech, to ML data science, to computers. I mean, I think we’re at the beginning of a huge wave of change because of data science. I think anything has relevance in how you analyze large amounts of data. So the benefit of what happened in the past 30 years is we digitized the world. Everything now is available. Everything from, you know, your Ancestry.com, a record of your grandparents immigration to some country is now digital and available. But we now have an explosion of data and the availability of the data. We don’t have the manpower to review all that data, so data science now has all of a sudden taken a huge leap forward.

And I think the ability to leverage and understanding the math, the science behind data analysis is going to drive what we do next. The AI model – I hate to use the word AI because it’s really an extension of just better data science and being able to see the insight from the noise of the data. So to me, if I were going to school, I would basically team that up. I would make sure I have a good background in understanding how to analyze large amounts of data. And also couple it with the practicality of whatever other field you choose, whether it’s engineering, science, or medicine, or even arts and literature. I mean, I have a friend who’s using AI to analyze pictures to see if their paintings are fraudulent or have been repainted. So there are all kinds of ways that data science is changing how technology can apply to different fields.