Vinod Khosla has stirred up some controversy in the healthcare community over the last several years by suggesting that computers might be able to provide better care than doctors.This includes remarks he made at Strata Rx in 2012, including that, We need to move from the practice of medicine to the science of medicine. And the science of medicine is way too complex for human beings to do.

So when I saw the news that Khosla Ventures has just invested $4Min Series A funding intoLumiata (formerly MEDgle), a company that specializes in healthcare data analytics, I was very curious to hear more about that companys vision.Ash Damle is the CEO at Lumiata.We recently spoke by phone to discuss how data can improve access to care and help level the playing field of care quality.

Ash Damle: Were bringing together the best of medical science and graph analytics to provide the best prescriptive analysis to those providing care. We data-mine all the publicly available data sources, such asjournals, de-identified records, etc. We analyze the data to make sure were learning the right things and, most importantly, what the relationships are among the data. We have fundamentally delved into looking at that whole graph, the way Google does to provide you with relevant search results. We curate those relationships to make sure theyre sensible, and take into account behavioral and social factors.

Our goal is to apply the best of medical science in every health interaction possible. In the long term, we want to optimize health. In the short term, we want to optimize care.

Ash Damle: Right now we have care as a service, but not necessarily health as a service. Care is reactive, while health is proactive. If you had a physician who could spend three hours a week looking over all of your data, he could tell you the things you need to do each week to stay healthy and be proactive. But thats not efficient. So we want to bring data science and the power of big data to bear, and we want to provide that anytime, anywhere.

Ash Damle: Theres so much medical science out there, but its really hard to apply it all within a limited amount of time. Were just in the beginning of the datification of health, but if we can computationalize medical science with all the power and nuance that computers and data analysis have to offer, then suddenly we have a way to apply the best of medical science to everyones care all the time.

The advent of the variety and volume of big data presents an opportunity to better contextually understand what is happening with the patient, and what is likely to occur in the future. Everyday we are amazed by the brilliance of physicians. We want to democratize medical science and make it easier so that all kinds of medical stafffrom advice nurses, to physicians assistants, to doctorscan apply higher quality care.

Were at the beginning of what we can do, and were excited about having such an extraordinary partner.

Ash Damle: Physicians and nurse practitioners and other providers are very empathetic people; part of why they do what they do is that they care. How do we superpower them and enable them to do the best they can by giving them the best tools?

The reality is that if a care provider is in the Southwest versus the Northeast of the United States, theyll see different things, and so the way they think about whats more likely will change based on local conditions. Experience is key and intuition is extraordinarily powerful. But intuition is the ability to synthesize huge numbers of variables and personal experience to deduce things from weak signals. In some sense, thats also what were trying to enable, because not everyone has the same level of experience that our best physicians do.We want to democratize that brilliance so that everyone gets the best care. We believe tools improving and applying the science of care should be used to augment and amplify the intangible human components.

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The democratization of medical science