Dr Martin Seneviratne is a doctor-turned-data scientist, bridging the divide between technology and healthcare. As a Senior Clinical Scientist with Google Health in London, Dr Seneviratne is an emerging leader in the nascent field of digital health, working on mobile tools and machine learning to improve the quality and accessibility of care.
Having undertaken both his undergraduate degree in Physics and his Medical degree at the University of Sydney, Dr Seneviratne was working as a junior doctor at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital when he made the decision to leap into the world of digital health. He’d felt first-hand the frustrations of outdated software systems, fragmented medical records, and broken lines of communication. So much of healthcare delivery, it seemed, was about getting the right information to the right person at the right time. While still at university, Dr Seneviratne developed an app to support task management across multidisciplinary clinical teams (WardConnect) and worked with the George Institute for Global Health on an app for community cardiovascular screening (HealthNavigator). Shortly after graduating, he was appointed to advisory roles with the Australian Digital Health Agency and the Australasian Institute of Digital Health. Then in 2016, he joined healthtech startup CancerAid – a ground-breaking app supporting cancer patients and their caregivers.
The more time Dr Seneviratne spent at the convergence of healthcare and technology, the more potential he saw in the community’s vision of a ‘learning health system’. In 2017, he began a two-year research masters in clinical informatics at Stanford University under the John Monash Scholarship, focusing on machine learning over hospital data. During his Masters, he was made a Digital Health Fellow at Stanford Medicine X – a think tank at the intersection of technology, design and healthcare – and quickly became a leading voice on translating machine learning to the bedside.
In 2019, Dr Seneviratne joined London-based AI research agency DeepMind as a Clinician Scientist, later merging with Google Health. His work today helps to shape the future of electronic health records – ranging from research on cutting-edge AI for hospital use-cases, through to lightweight mobile EHRs for community health care workers in low-resource settings. In 2023, he will co-chair the World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (MedInfo) back home in Sydney.
Listen to the full interview with Martin Seneviratne on our #BornGlobal podcast. Available on your favourite podcast platforms or here on our website.
See Dr Seneviratne’s response here to being named the Awardee of the Emerging Leader Award for 2022.
