Aaron Abend, M.B.A., is a software technology entrepreneur with 35 years of experience in database development, the past 20 focused on health care and medical research. He was cofounder of Recombinant Data, a software company that helped academic medical centers leverage electronic health records for research. Deloitte Consulting acquired Recombinant in 2012. In 2013, after his mother was diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome, he found that statistics on autoimmune diseases were lacking, and he saw the need for a national registry for autoimmune disease, modeled on the National Cancer Registry.
In 2015, Aaron founded Autoimmune Registry, Inc. (ARI), a hub for research, statistics, and patient data on all autoimmune diseases. ARI, which provides disease profiles on more than 150 autoimmune diseases that affect millions of Americans, maintains its own patient registry and collaborates with disease-specific nonprofit patient groups to support research and drug discovery. In 2020, ARI formed a collaboration with the University of Southern California to study the impact of COVID-19 on patients with autoimmune disease. In support of this project, ARI has joined the NIH National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C).
Aaron is best known for his work with Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside (i2b2), an NIH-funded, open-source software program that supports medical research by enabling HIPAA-compliant exploration of patient data. He has implemented i2b2 databases at dozens of academic medical centers around the country. Aaron has also been active in the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) program at Columbia University. He has become an expert in the transformation of data into the OHDSI data system, which All of Us adopted for its data repository.
Aaron is an expert on health care data integration, data quality, and governance. He has published several papers on these topics and reviews papers for the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and the OHDSI program. He holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an M.B.A. from Columbia University, and he studied biomedical informatics at Stanford University.
