Tech Tonics: Arnaub Chatterjee – Making Healthcare Smart

Arnaub Chatterjee comes from a long line of physicians, and in his youth, assumed he’d follow the family tradition. At college at the University of Michigan, he pursued a well-traveled path towards medicine, graduating with a degree in cell and molecular biology. But then his heart wandered, and ultimately he found himself having a difficult conversation with his parents. Fortunately, he assures us, his younger sister eventually became a physician, much to his parents’ delight — and relief.

Arnaub, meanwhile, pursued an interest at the intersection of the business and policy aspects of healthcare, working for an HMO one summer, a physicians group supporting a national healthcare plan the next, and at https://www.samhsa.gov/within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the summer after that, focused on mental health.

He continued his training at Cornell, pursuing an intense dual degree program focused on health policy and healthcare administration – his fellow alums include previous Tech Tonics guest Nancy Schlichting, and also former Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini. Upon graduation, Arnaub pursued healthcare consulting at Deloitte, then left to work in the Obama administration.

After initially working in a division focused on Medicare fraud, his life changed when he happened to hear a talk by legendary healthcare innovator and entrepreneur Todd Park. He soon joined Todd and the remarkable group that was around him working to change the way technology could impact health and health policy. Arnaub helped launch healthdata.gov, established the first cohort of the Innovation Fellows program within government and co-authored one of the seminal whitepapers on big data in healthcare with colleagues at McKinsey. Not only was the work interesting, he says, but the relationships he formed shaped the future trajectory of his career.

Arnaub’s first post-government role was in health technology at Merck, where he had been recruited by former colleague (and previous Tech Tonics guest) Sachin Jain; Jain had recently left D.C. for Merck and invited Arnaub to join him. There, Arnaub focused on some of the earliest efforts to introduce real word data into Merck’s clincial evidence and data science strategy. Following his time at Merck, he then reconnected with colleagues at McKinsey where he continued to focus on R&D strategy and data science, serving both biopharma and the major technology companies who were entering the healthcare industry.

After a McKinsey colleague, Sastry Chilukuri, left to pursue some of these concepts at Medidata – specifically, to develop Medidata’s data science entity, Acorn AI – Arnaub joined him. Today, he serves as the SVP of Product, where he oversees all strategy and go-to-market over products such as synthetic control arms, trial design, imaging analytics and the company’s work in the ‘omics space.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.