Taha Kass-Hout

Taha A. Kass-Hout
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Born	(1971-05-03) May 3, 1971 Damascus, Syria
Citizenship	American
Education	University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (MD, MS)
Occupation	Physician, data scientist, technology executive
Employer	GE HealthCare
Known for	Health informatics, artificial intelligence in healthcare, public health surveillance
Title	Global Chief Science and Technology Officer
Board member of	AdvaMed Digital Health Tech Division

Taha A. Kass-Hout, born May 3, 1971, is an American physician, data scientist and technology executive. He currently serves as Global Chief Science and Technology Officer at GE HealthCare. Kass-Hout has held leadership positions at the CDC, FDA, Amazon, and GE HealthCare, focusing on health data science and technology.

Early life and education

Kass-Hout was born in Damascus, Syria. His father, Abdo Kass-Hout, who was an architect, designed the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Damascus. Taha Kass-Hout earned a Doctor of Medicine (MD) and a Master of Science (MS) in Biostatistics from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and completed clinical training in interventional cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School.

Career

After completing his medical and biostatistics training, Kass-Hout served in the fields of public health and informatics at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) . In 2009 he joined CDC’s Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office as the Director of Health Informatics Solutions and Operations. During his time at CDC, he contributed to the redesign of the BioSense program into BioSense 2.0. This later came to be known as the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), which emphasized data sharing and cloud-based infrastructure.

In 2013, Kass-Hout was appointed the first Chief Health Informatics Officer at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In this role, he led new initiatives in regulatory science and data transparency such as openFDA , which is a cloud-based environment for genomic research.

After his role at the FDA, Kass-Hout joined Amazon as Vice President of Machine Learning, Distinguished Engineer, and Chief Medical Officer. At Amazon, he helped direct the company’s health AI strategy. He also oversaw the development of machine learning services including Amazon Comprehend Medical and AWS HealthLake, a secure healthcare data lake and analytics solution . During the COVID-19 pandemic he also helped lead efforts to establish Amazon’s diagnostic laboratory and secure FDA authorization for its testing program and helped launch Amazon Pharmacy.

In January 2023, Kass-Hout became the first Global Chief Science and Technology Officer at GE HealthCare, where he leads research and development strategy and integration of artificial intelligence into medical imaging and clinical workflows. He also serves as inaugural Chair of the Digital Health Tech Division Board of Directors of AdvaMed for the 2023-2025 term.

Research and publications

Kass-Hout’s academic work includes health informatics, biosurveillance, post-market surveillance and foundation models in medical imaging.

Selected publications

Freifeld C. C., Chunara R., Mekaru S. R., Chan E. H., Kass-Hout T., et al. “Participatory epidemiology: use of mobile phones for community-based health reporting.” PLoS Medicine 7(12): e1000376 (2010).

Kass-Hout T. A., Alhinnawi H. “Social media in public health.” British Medical Bulletin 108(1): 5-24 (2013).

Kass-Hout T. A., Xu Z., McMurray P., Park S., Buckeridge D. L., Brownstein J. S., Finelli L., Groseclose S. L. “Application of change point analysis to daily influenza-like illness emergency department visits.” JAMIA 19(6): 1075-1081 (2012).

Kass-Hout T. A., Xu Z., Mohebbi M., Nelsen H., Baker A., Levine J., Johanson E., Bright R. A. “OpenFDA: an innovative platform providing access to a wealth of FDA’s publicly available data.” JAMIA 23(3): 596-600 (2016).

Duggirala H. J., Tonning J. M., Smith E., Bright R. A., Baker J. D., Ball R., Bell C., … Kass-Hout T. A., et al. “Use of data mining at the Food and Drug Administration.” JAMIA 23(2): 428-434 (2016).

Xu Z., Kass-Hout T., Anderson-Smits C., Gray G. “Signal detection using change point analysis in post-market surveillance.” Pharmacoepidemiology & Drug Safety 24(6): 663-668 (2015).

Kass-Hout T. A., Stevens L. M., Hall J. L. “American Heart Association precision medicine platform.” Circulation 137(7): 647-649 (2018).

Isreb M. A., Kaysi S., Rifai A. O., Al Kukhun S. A., Al-Adwan S. A., Kass-Hout T. A. “The effect of war on Syrian refugees with end-stage renal disease.” Kidney International Reports 2(5): 960-965 (2017).

Kass-Hout T. A., Zhang X. (eds.) Biosurveillance: Methods and Case Studies. CRC Press (2010).

Madoff L. C., Fisman D. N., Kass-Hout T. “A new approach to monitoring dengue activity.” PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases5(5): e1215 (2011).

Konwer A., Yang Z., Bas E., Xiao C., Prasanna P., Bhatia P., Kass-Hout T. “Enhancing SAM with Efficient Prompting and Preference Optimization for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation.” arXiv:2503.04639 (2025).

Ravishankar H., Patil R., Melapudi V., Suthar H., Anzengruber S., Bhatia P., Kass-Hout T., Annangi P. “SonoSAMTrack – Segment and Track Anything on Ultrasound Images.” arXiv:2310.16872 (2023).

GE HealthCare. “GE HealthCare unveils research on advanced 3D MRI foundation model.” GE HealthCare Insights (online article).

Patents

US Patent Application US 20120284039 A1 (“Method and system for generating biometrics within a telecommunication device”) lists Kass-Hout among the inventors.

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