Nader Mherabi, the Chief Digital and Information Officer at NYU Langone Health, has led the institution's data strategy well before the current wave of AI, building the foundations for a data-driven health system. In 2017, he recognized that the quality of NYU Langone's data collection and created an opportunity to push further with emerging AI capabilities.

The metaphor Nader returned to: If you want clean water, fix the pipes. Don't try to filter it at the end.

Aly McGue: NYU Langone is a metrics-driven organization with a mature data stack. When you already have a functional warehouse and data lake, what is the 'missing piece’ that makes a move to a modern data platform necessary?

Nader Mherabi: Our path was a little different from some institutions. We've always been a highly data-driven, metrics-driven organization. We already had unified data in a data lake and an enterprise data warehouse, even in the traditional stack. So, the lift to a modern platform was easier for us than it might be for others.