Justin Whatling, managing director global health and life sciences, Palantir

Describe your career to date

My career in health informatics spanned over two decades, and started with a passion for measuring patient outcomes when assessing the impact of new treatments for Motor Neurone Disease while an undergraduate at Kings College London. I subsequently worked to advance the then limited use of IT in healthcare while practicing at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Digital health has enabled me to impact the care of millions of patients around the world and has been the best way for me to contribute back as a doctor to the care of patients and populations.

My early commercial career was spent developing a start-up, Outcome Technologies, one of the first companies measuring Patient Reported Outcome Measures, supporting pharma and medical devices companies with cost-effectiveness evaluation at the advent of NICE, and subsequently supporting care providers monitor quality of care provision. Through leadership roles in BT, Cerner and Palantir, I have pioneered work in telehealth, patient support programmes, clinical performance improvement, shared care records, life sciences, and population health management in countries around the world.

I am equally proud of my contribution to professionalism and the wider informatics community. As vice-chair and then chair for health at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, I helped launch the hugely successful chief clinical information officer campaign, ran tech start-up schools for health entrepreneurs, established the Federation of Informatics Professionals to bring together our IT professional groups, and helped to establish the Faculty of Clinical Informatics, where I subsequently sat on Council. 

It has also been a privilege to teach and give back experience through roles such as visiting professor in health informatics at UCL, non-executive director roles on the boards of esteemed and prestigious organisations with the BMJ Publishing Group and the National Institute for Health & Care Excellence, and through the BCS Academy of Computing Board.