Alfred Whitehead
EVP Applied Sciences
Klick Health
Tech Guru Transforms Disease Data
When Alfred Whitehead was just seven years old, he and a friend programmed his father’s TRS-80 Micro Computer System. A few years later, they did the same thing with the iconic Apple II. “Computing was end-to-end for me—I did everything from building them from parts, to networking them together, to writing the games to play on them,” he recalls. Four decades later, Alf has channeled that passion for innovation and technology to help reshape the healthcare industry, making him worthy of recognition as a PM360 ELITE Tech-know Geek. Currently, Alf is the EVP of Klick Health’s Applied Sciences team, who use their business acumen and multidisciplinary scientific capabilities to solve difficult problems for a wide range of life sciences clients.
Alf’s team developed the HealthVoyager in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital, which won Eli Lilly’s Digital Health Innovation Challenge for Inflammatory Bowel Disease in December 2019. The accolade earned a lot of praise as well as $50,000 to help commercialize the platform. The team is also investigating how “small data” machine learning can be applied to a patient’s data to understand how their disease manifests over time and how each individual’s disease differs from each other. This allows sub-typing of a disease to tailor solutions that meet the specific needs of individual patients. Alf says, “I’m proud of the innovative work we are doing in machine learning to develop algorithms that can predict type 1 diabetic patients’ blood glucose levels 30 minutes into the future. It shows great promise and could make a real difference in helping people better manage diabetes.”
Alf has a long history of being at the cutting edge of technology at Klick. Yan Fossat, VP of Klick Labs, calls Alf “a true innovator” and says, “Being a technology polymath, Alf is not constrained by narrow knowledge when developing a tech solution. He can almost instantaneously point out where there is a problem to solve and how to solve it.” In the end, that’s what makes Alf a brilliant Tech-know Geek. That, and his commitment to leveraging and evolving technology to help make a tangible difference in patients’ lives.
