Former top FDA digital leader lands at Mayo Clinic

Mario Aguilar covers technology in health care, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, wearable devices, telehealth, and digital therapeutics. His stories explore how tech is changing the practice of health care and the business and policy challenges to realizing tech’s promise. He’s also the co-author of the free, twice weekly STAT Health Tech newsletter. You can reach Mario on Signal at mariojoze.13.

Sonja Fulmer, who recently left her role as a top digital health official at the Food and Drug Administration, last week started a new position focused on health tech policy at the Mayo Clinic. She is the second top health regulator to land at the system this year, and follows a handful of other senior government leaders who’ve left federal roles for health tech industry jobs.

Fulmer updated her LinkedIn profile in early September to say that she is now a senior director of health policy at Mayo Clinic. She spent 11 years at FDA and was until August the acting head of the Digital Health Center of Excellence. She joins Micky Tripathi, who started at Mayo Clinic as chief artificial intelligence implementation officer earlier this year after serving as the top health IT regulator during President Biden’s administration. During Tripathi’s tenure, his role of National Coordinator for Health Information Technology expanded to become the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy.

Both Fulmer and Tripathi were involved in conversations about how to regulate artificial intelligence in health care while in government. The Digital Health Center of Excellence has issued several guidelines for manufacturers on development of AI-enabled medical devices and how the agency intended to regulate them. It also created a digital health advisory committee that took up regulation of generative AI at its first meeting.