Decode Health Adds Board Chairman and Chief Medical Officer

Don Hardison and Frank Cockerill, MD, will Expand their Roles within the Healthcare AI Company

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Sept. 27, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Decode Health, a rapidly growing healthcare AI company that enables a partner ecosystem to innovate and solve data challenges involving disease risk, announced today that two healthcare industry veterans will expand their current advisory roles within the company. Don Hardison will join the Board of Directors as Chairman. Franklin R. Cockerill, III, MD, will serve as Decode Health's Chief Medical Officer and also join the Board of Directors. Hardison and Cockerill are executives with extensive healthcare industry experience scaling successful start-ups and serving in leadership roles at emerging private, public, and Fortune 500 companies.

Hardison was most recently President, CEO, and Board Member of Biotheranostics, Inc., a company developing molecular tests to guide cancer treatment. He previously was President, CEO, and Director of Good Start Genetics and EXACT Sciences Corp. For over 40 years, Hardison has held executive and senior management positions at companies including SmithKline Beecham, Quest Diagnostics, and LabCorp, where he served as COO. From 2016 to 2022, Hardison was a member of the Board of Directors of IQuity, Inc., a genomics company founded by the Decode Health leadership team to advance molecular diagnostics for autoimmune diseases. IQuity and Decode recently combined operations and now operate as Decode Health.

"I have worked with the team at Decode for many years and respect the passion they bring to their work," says Hardison. "Decode is fueling an ecosystem of diagnostic, pharmaceutical, and technology partners that will accelerate biomarker and therapeutic discoveries. I am excited to continue my work with the Decode management team and other board members as we advance our mission to build a valuable company that delivers data, products, and services to advance precision medicine."

Dr. Cockerill is currently a founding partner of Trusted Health Advisors, a healthcare consulting and innovation group, and an adjunct professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center. Before founding Trusted Health Advisors, Dr. Cockerill served as CEO, Chief Medical Officer, and Director of the Board of Analyte Health, a telehealth company, based in Chicago, IL. Prior to Analyte Health, Dr. Cockerill held several senior academic leadership roles, including service as Chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, and President and CEO of Mayo Medical Laboratories (MML). Dr. Cockerill is board certified in internal medicine, infectious disease, and clinical microbiology.

"Decode is doing groundbreaking work in RNA genomics and advanced population health analytics that accelerates innovation and speed to value for diagnostic, pharmaceutical and technology companies building new products and services," says Cockerill. "I look forward to working with the Decode team, board members, and our partners as we work to advance precision medicine."

Over time, Decode Health has matured its approach to organize information, spotlight disease trends, and uncover actionable insights that accelerate speed to value among Decode's ecosystem partners. Decode's team uses machine learning to analyze genomic, clinical, and social determinants of health (SDoH) data to produce innovative clinical decision support tools and molecular diagnostics that predict health outcomes. Examples of Decode's work include building predictive models to define personas of elderly cancer patients to determine treatment tolerability and collaborating with Quest Diagnostics to identify novel biomarkers to improve the ability to diagnose, predict and treat disease. Decode's predictive capabilities improve outcomes, lower costs and promote health equity.

"Over the years, Don and Frank have provided invaluable support and strategic guidance as we launched and developed Decode Health," says Chase Spurlock, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Decode Health. "We're honored they have accepted our invitation to expand their roles within the company. Their guidance and deep healthcare experience will strengthen our efforts to build a growing ecosystem of diagnostic, pharmaceutical, and technology partners to advance precision medicine and improve health outcomes."

Decode Health is a healthcare AI company that powers an ecosystem of industry-leading diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies to unlock discoveries with data. Current projects include genomic data creation, RNA diagnostics, and population health analytics. Over the course of a decade, the team leading Decode has built a framework leveraging a variety of advanced machine learning approaches. The company's flexible, scalable approach layers clinical data with SDoH and non-clinical data to fuel innovation and advance precision medicine. Decode's data assets, products, and services improve patient outcomes, lower costs, and promote health equity. For more information, visit www.DecodeHealth.ai.

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SOURCE Decode Health