Practicing precision medicine from 700 trillion points of dataAtul Butte on Reducing unwarranted variations

What role can data play in reducing unwarranted variations? Prof. Atul Butte, MD, PhD, believes that today’s scattered data landscape leaves much room for unwarranted variation and does not help provide real-world insights or best practice at scale. At the Siemens Healthineers Executive Summit 2019, Atul Butte illustrated how large-scale data analysis is possible and how it can solve practical problems while paying for itself.

Watch his full talk.



Currently, vast amounts of data are generated in healthcare. But what are we doing with all of this data? As the example of UC Health demonstrated, Atul Butte suggests, this data can be used to improve the practice of medicine by reducing unwarranted variations which, ultimately, transforms to real savings in healthcare cost.

Today, we have a large amount of unwanted practice variation in care delivery, but Atul Butte argues data is the first real way to study unwarranted variations and to control them. The large-scale aggregation of integrated data sets allows a precise understanding of patient conditions and can help to define the right treatment at the right time for every patient.


Atul Butte

Director and Chief Data Scientist of the University of California Health System, Atul Butte is a leading expert on big data in precision medicine. With over 200 publications and research regularly featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Wired Magazine, Atul Butte is also a founder of three investor-backed, data-driven companies. He has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for 20 years and has been recognized by the Obama administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data.


Siemens Healthineers Executive Summit is an invitation-only exclusive event gathering prominent healthcare executives to think big about the healthcare transformation.

Find out more.