Advisors bring large-scale medical research, statistical, epidemiological, operational and funding expertise to the company

Verisense® Health, Inc., a digital health software and data management company, today announced the four founding members of its Board of Advisors – Dr. William Crown, Paul Hartung, Dr. Ronald C. Kessler, and Josh Tolkoff.

“I am delighted to introduce the first members of the Verisense Health Board of Advisors just one week after our successful launch as a spin-off from Shimmer Research, the global wearable technology services and sensor manufacturing company,” said Geoffrey Gill, CEO of Verisense Health. “These world-renowned experts will play an integral role in the build out of our Verisense Digital Health Panel (DHP), which was developed to provide clinical researchers with access to well annotated, device-agnostic, minimally processed digital health data.”

The Verisense DHP is recruiting both clinical study participants and healthy volunteers to its institutional review board approved longitudinal study. Participants contribute their medical history, wearable sensor data, and monthly survey data to the Verisense DHP. These data can be combined with patient reported outcomes and real-world data, including tokenized medical records, claims data, and pharmacy records, to provide a complete longitudinal view of participant health.

Advisors’ Areas of Expertise

Dr. William Crown is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Brandeis’ The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He is an internationally recognized expert in real-world data analysis, focusing upon research designs and statistical methods for drawing causal inferences from transactional health care datasets such as medical claims and electronic health records. Bill began his career at the Heller School in the early 1980s focusing on the demography and health economics of aging and he taught a series of statistics courses in the Heller PhD program. He left Brandeis to lead health economics consultancies at Truven and Optum. As Chief Scientific Officer at OptumLabs, he conducted research comparing the results obtained from analyzing claims data from over 100 million covered lives with those from randomized clinical trials. He received his PhD in regional economic modelling from MIT, and an MA in Economics from Boston University.

Paul Hartung has a long, proven track record as a life sciences and technology executive with extensive leadership experience in financing, operations and business development in the technology and medical device industries. He has launched successful startup businesses (Cognoptix, Summit, Winphoria) and has held leadership roles in Fortune 500 organizations (GE, 3Com, Motorola). Paul serves on corporate and advisory boards of life science startups (Leuko, Clairways), and as a mentor in several programs, including MIT VMS. He graduated from MIT with an MS in Mechanical Engineering with honors and holds a number of patents and publications.

Dr. Ronald C. Kessler is the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of 700+ publications and has been the most widely cited psychiatry researcher in the world in each of the past 10 years. He is also recipient of the Senior Scientist and MERIT Awards from the National Institute of Mental Health. Ronald is principal investigator on the US National Comorbidity Survey, studying mental disorders in the U.S., and Co-Director of WHO’s World Mental Health Survey Initiative. He is also a principal investigator for the Army STARRS-LS program of research on risk and protective factors for suicide among Army personnel, the AURORA study of adverse neuropsychiatric reactions to traumatic life events, and the Appalachia Mind Health trial augmenting pharmacotherapy with remote cognitive behavioral therapy for major depression. Ronald received his PhD in sociology from New York University, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, and then joined the University of Michigan as a Professor of Sociology and a Program Director at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

Josh Tolkoff is Accelerator Executive at CIMIT (the Consortium for Integrating Medical with Innovation & Technology), accelerating the commercialization of research projects. Josh is former Managing Director of Ironwood Equity Fund, a later-stage venture investor. He also founded and managed Seedling Enterprises, one of the most successful medical device accelerators, and ACT Medical, a premier medical device developer and manufacturer. Josh was Head of R&D for Medi-Tech, which became Boston Scientific. He is also the Past Chair of industry trade group MassMedic, and an advisor and lecturer for the Harvard-MIT program in Health Sciences and Technology. He is a director of numerous for-profit companies and the founding Board Chair of Interise, a non-profit helping small urban companies grow, which is now in 75+ US cities. Josh has an AB from Harvard College and an MS from MIT.

Verisense Health staff members will be available to answer questions about the new company, its Verisense wearable sensor platform, and Verisense DHP in booth #631 at the Summit for Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE). This conference will be held from February 6-9 both virtually and in person at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida.

About Verisense Health

Verisense Health is a digital health software and data management company. It is leveraging its Verisense wearable sensor platform and Verisense DHP to create a digital biobank that researchers can use to conduct digital health research without needing to collect new patient data. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, MA with additional offices in Malaysia. For more information visit www.verisense.net, www.linkedin.com/company/verisense-health or www.facebook.com/VerisenseDigitalHealth.