John Torous, M.D., M.B.I. is director of the digital psychiatry division, in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Harvard Medical School affiliated teaching hospital, where he also serves as a staff psychiatrist and assistant professor. He has a background in electrical engineering and computer sciences and received an undergraduate degree in the field from UC Berkeley before attending medical school at UC San Diego. He completed his psychiatry residency, fellowship in clinical informatics, and master's degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard. Dr. Torous is active in investigating the potential of mobile mental health technologies for psychiatry and has published over 250 peer reviewed articles and 5 book chapters on the topic. He directs the Digital Psychiatry Clinic at BIDMC which seeks to improve access to and quality of mental health care through augmenting treatment with digital innovations. At a system level, Dr. Torous is the medical director of behavioral health informatics for Beth Israel Lahey Health. Dr. Torous serves as editor-in-chief for the journal JMIR Mental Health, web editor for JAMA Psychiatry, and a member of various American Psychiatric Association committees.
Within the context of a digital psychiatric clinic, this project will assess how Google Takeout data can improve diagnosis and clinical predictions, develop an ethical framework for research on this topic, and update training and clinical procedures to integrate such data into patient care.