Thomas Goetz, Mph

co-founder. building h. chief of research goodrx

A journalist and entrepreneur, Thomas helps people understand complicated things with data, design, and stories.

He is presently the Chief of Research at GoodRx, the nation's leading resource for affordable healthcare. Previously he co-founded Iodine.com, the Webby-award winning "Yelp for medicine" (as Time called it) that let people understand which medications work best for them, based on a database of more than 100,000 real-world experiences.

In collaboration with the Food and Drug Administration's office of innovation, Thomas led Iodine's development of openFDA.gov, a landmark effort to unleash public data to a community of developers, researchers, and consumers.

Thomas served as executive editor at WIRED, which he led to a dozen National Magazine Awards from 2001 through 2012, and where he wrote dozens of cover stories on technology, science, and medicine. His last book, The Remedy, about the quest to cure tuberculosis, was chosen by Amazon as a Best Book of 2014. His previous book, The Decision Tree, was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as a Best Health Book of 2010, and hailed as offering a new vision for patient-centered healthcare in the US. His writing has been repeatedly selected for the Best American Science Writing and Best Technology Writing anthologies.

He served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where he founded Flip the Clinic, a project to transform the practitioner-patient encounter. He also served as Curator-in-Residence for the Adobe Digital Museum. His 2010 TED talk on visualizing medical data has been viewed more than half a million times.

Informing principle: Follow the data. Give people the tools to make better decisions, and they just might surprise you.