Taha Kass Hout
General Manager, Health AI & Chief Medical Officer, Amazon Web Services
Taha is General Manager, Health AI & Chief Medical Officer at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Prior to joining Amazon, Taha was a public servant during the Obama Administration (2009-2016) bringing about change through his role as the first Chief Health Informatics Officer for US FDA (2013-2016), where he created openFDA and precisionFDA, part of President Obama’s 2015 Precision Medicine Initiative. Both efforts were referenced in the 2015 White House Strategy for American Innovation, and precisionFDA was awarded the top prize at the 2016 Bio-IT World Best Practices. Additionally, Taha spearheaded groundbreaking programs at the US CDC for electronic disease surveillance (2009-2013), including the quick disease surveillance scale-up during the H1N1 influenza pandemic taking it from less than 6% to >90% coverage of the US population ahead of the 2nd wave of the pandemic. During his one-year transition from the US Federal Government, Taha served as SVP and Chief Digital Health and Analytics Officer at Trinity Health (2016-2017), one of the leaders in value-based health care systems in the US, and led the development of the American Heart Association Precision Medicine initiative. Taha received his medical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, and during his time there, was part of the BOAT heart stenting clinical trial. He holds a Doctor of Medicine and Master of Science (Bioinformatics.) from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.