Dr. Hossein Estiri is the director of the CLinical Augmented Intelligence group. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Medicine at HMS, a research staff with the MGH Department of Medicine, and an affiliated faculty with the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies and Harvard Data Science Initiative.

As a social scientist, data scientist, and clinical informaticist, his most recent work has focused on architecting visual analytics application to explore data quality in Electronic Health Records data and characterize patients, using Statistical Learning techniques and Data Science methodologies.

He has developed informatics systems and explainable machine learning methodologies for improving the care for patients by enhancing knowledge discovery from the massive amounts of clinical data. A considerable portion of his research in clinical informatics has been on understanding the issues in clinical data and exploring the possibilities for their secondary use in research and medical knowledge discovery. While much of the machine learning in healthcare has been steered by computer scientists, who often prioritize prediction accuracy over interpretability, my research focuses on developing computational methods that prioritize clinician interpretability over prediction.

CLAI’s approach to applying computational algorithms to clinical data is to start with user interpretability and work backward to the technology.

Dr. Estiri has developed the novel thinkin’ learning machine learning framework (MLHO) that enables adaptive knowledge discovery from clinical data for the identification of temporal diagnostic/prognostic biomarkers of health outcomes. The temporal methodology he has developed for cohort identification and prediction with EHR data demonstrates clear evidence of the feasibility of the approaches to model complex evolving phenotypes.

His research on COVID-19 using EHR data has made impact on national and international health policy and highlighted in news outlet including Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, USA Today, New York Times, Toronto Star, Becker’s Hospital Review, Telegraph, Boston Globe (among others). More importantly, his group’s research has impacted healthcare policy nationally and internationally.

Dr. Estiri holds a PhD in Urban Design & Planning and a PhD track in Statistics from University of Washington.