
Oracle executive Troy Tazbaz named new FDA director of digital health
The FDA has found a brand new director of the Digital Health Center of Excellence in Troy Tazbaz, a former senior vice president at Oracle.
According to Tazbaz’s LinkedIn, he took a five-month break after leaving an 11-year career at Oracle before joining the FDA in January. Stat News first reported the hire. Tazbaz also said on his LinkedIn that he biked all the way from Chesapeake Bay to the San Francisco Bay over 58 days during his career break.
Tazbaz is the third leader of the department since Bakul Patel left nine months ago to join Google as senior director of the giant’s digital health strategy and regulatory team. Deputy Director Brendan O’Leary then took over as acting director until Tazbaz joined.
In an emailed statement to Endpoints News, the FDA said Tazbaz will lead the program as digital health technologies become more significant, and as Congress has called on the FDA to provide more guidance in this space.
“In his role, Troy will lead the Digital Health Center of Excellence in its next phase, which is focused on continued growth and improvement of building and sustaining capacity for strategic partnerships, innovating regulatory frameworks for digital health and continued harmonization with other regulators,” an FDA spokesperson wrote.
At Oracle, Tazbaz started out as senior director of the company’s cloud data center strategy and planning, then moved to VP of corporate operations before ending as SVP of the industries business unit strategy and operations.
The Digital Health Center of Excellence opened its doors in 2020, housed within the Center for Devices and Radiological Health as a way to advance technology within healthcare, via mobile health devices, software as a medical device, wearable medical devices and technologies used to study medical products.
Tazbaz isn’t the only one to flip-flop between big tech and the FDA. Current FDA Commissioner Robert Califf went to Alphabet to take a full-time role as head of medical strategy and policy across the Google Health and Verily units in 2019 before being confirmed again as commissioner in 2022.