Dr. Smit J. Patel is a seasoned health technology professional dedicated to driving innovation through digital health evidence evaluation, regulatory advancements, and implementation science to achieve impactful outcomes at scale. He currently serves as the Director, Digital Health and AI, for healthcare innovation programs at the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), a 501(c)(3) global non-profit organization dedicated to advancing digital medicine to optimize human health. Smit’s work focuses on applied approaches to the safe, effective, ethical, and equitable use of digital technologies to advance clinical research, clinical care, and public health. Smit is an Advisory Board member for The Economic Impact and the Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health and serves on advisory committees for digital health program(s) at the Association of Community Cancer Centers (ACCC), APACMed, American Pharmacists Association (APhA). To help share the future of ideas, he serves as a member of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) Advisory Council.
Smit recently led building CancerX, the first public-private partnership announced by The White House as a national accelerator to boost innovation in the fight against cancer as part of the reignited Cancer Moonshot. More recently, he led the partnership with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the largest healthcare system in the US to develop a consistent approach in deploying digital-health technologies at scale by designing approaches to cultivating successful VA-industry collaborations and building frameworks to evaluate, adopt, and scale successful integration of digital solutions into the VA system. Smit was a founding member for IMPACT, Virtual-First Medical Practice Collaboration co-hosted by DiMe and the American Telemedicine Association (ATA) to expand access to high-quality, evidence-based virtual first care.
Previously, Smit also co-led an external partnership with the health innovation hub (hih) of the German Federal Ministry of Health to define global priorities to advance innovation in evidence generation for the broad acceptance of digital health applications. Building upon that, he has recently led a pre-competitive, multi-stakeholder collaborative with FDA, Google, Harvard, and 16 partners to chart digital health regulatory pathways to optimize product development, regulatory strategy, and decision-making for healthcare innovators. He has spent the last decade working at the intersection of innovative medicine, technology, and healthcare from the health tech, pharmaceutical industry, and consulting space.
Smit earned his Doctorate in Pharmacy (PharmD) from the Ohio State University. He currently holds a faculty position for the Digital Health Innovation Certificate Program at the Brown University School of Professional Studies. Additionally, he is a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum, a Forbes 30 under 30 scholar, a TEDx speaker, and an MIT-Harvard Health Innovation alumnus.
