Dr. Ruchi Thanawala was recruited to Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in late 2020. She joined the thoracic surgery faculty after completing her cardiothoracic surgery fellowship at the University of Iowa and her general surgery residency at University of Massachusetts
Medical School-Baystate Medical center. She founded and is Director of the Surgical Data and Decision Sciences Lab for the Department of Surgery at OHSU. This lab is one of the first-of-its kind as a lab dedicated to the analysis of the vast tracts of surgical data to derive knowledge and intelligence in the realms of learning, clinical and operational sciences.

It was during her training that Dr. Thanawala identified a gap in the application of data science and informatics in our drive for competency-based surgical education and surgical skills assessment. She felt that she could be a pioneer in finding solutions to this problem. During Dr. Thanawala’s general surgery residency, she completed a Masters of Science in Health Informatics from Northwestern University and a Surgical Education Research Fellowship from the Association of Surgical Education, becoming one of a very small number of thoracic surgeon informaticians with education research training in the U.S. She has brought together the fields of informatics, focused on data science and AI, surgical education, and clinical surgery to create a new niche of informatics-driven surgical education and surgeon computer-based workflow optimization. To bring her research to national scale, she designed and developed a novel comprehensive medical education platform based on optimized workflow and computational
modeling methodology. The platform has spun off into a start-up company and a non-profit and has expanded to over 120 hospitals and over 17 surgical and procedural specialties. 

Dr. Thanawala is regarded internationally for her innovative approach to AI in surgical education, skills assessment, applied decision science in learning science, and workflow optimization and in healthcare broadly. She has been an invited speaker at institutions and societies throughout the US and internationally and featured in media such as podcasts and articles for her thought leadership. She has been awarded a U.S. patent for her platform, prescriptive analytics, and learning curves of operative skills with multiple other pending US and international patents. 

She aspires to extend her work and expertise into surgical skills assessment for the continuum of a surgeon’s career and match skill and experience to patient outcomes.