Isaac (Zak) Kohane is the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. In this episode, Zak talks with us about how medicine, at its core, is information processing. But in medical data science, one has to understand and to model the dynamics of two orthogonal systems: the patient’s physiology and the dynamics of the healthcare system, in particular the integrating intelligence of doctors who decide about a patient’s path through that system. Zak also tells us how his creative process is an engineering process, how important the right abstraction of the data is, and how reading science fiction gives him the courage to think beyond the technology that is currently feasible. For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .