Dale Sanders is a data strategy expert who has served in several complex domains. In healthcare, he is internationally recognized as a leader in the technical and cultural adoption of data, analytics, and data science. He served as the Regional Director of Medical Informatics at Intermountain Healthcare from 1997-2005 where he designed and developed the enterprise data warehouse, one of the first in US healthcare. This warehouse played a pivotal role in the development of Intermountain’s primary care clinical program, a pioneer in the use of data science to support public and population health. He received five national awards for his accomplishments during this time. From there, he transitioned into academic medicine as CIO and chief analytics officer at Northwestern Medicine from 2005-2009, again leading the hands-on design and development of the enterprise data warehouse. This warehouse, in turn, played a pioneering role in combining genomic and EHR data to understand phenotypic expression of several disease states. In 2009, he transitioned into public health as CIO for the National Health System of the Cayman Islands, and was involved in the early stages of developing Health City Cayman Islands, a tertiary, world class facility. In 2015, he became the chief technology and product officer at Health Catalyst (NASDQ: HCAT), where he developed the Data Operating System and several related products including Touchstone, a data repository designed to support national-level data science and analytics for public and population health monitoring, and clinical trials. Touchstone contains over 100 million patients, and growing. It was leveraged extensively, and continues to be used, to support the nation’s COVID response. Among other roles, he currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Intelligent Medical Objects, a clinical terminology and data quality tool embedded in 85% of US electronic health records.
Prior to healthcare, Dale was involved in complex data fusion and high-risk decision support as a Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) officer in the US Air Force supporting 24×7 nuclear warfare and space operations for the Strategic Air Command across all seven continents. He served as CIO and Airborne Launch Control Officer on the Looking Glass, aka “The Doomsday Plane.” After the Air Force, he worked for TRW in the space and defense sector where his team pioneered the development of neural networks, back-propagation networks, genetic algorithms, and case-based reasoning systems, supporting image analysis, free-text and linguistic analysis, and the analysis of sensor and national intelligence data to reduce false positives and false negatives in the context of a nuclear attack. Through that work, he identified the opportunity to apply those tools and technologies in healthcare. He has undergraduate degrees in chemistry and biology; his graduate studies in Information Systems Engineering were sponsored by the US Air Force.