Data science is an emerging discipline that will be instrumental in accelerating healthcare innovation and transforming the healthcare industry to improve the quality and cost of services provided to patients. Data science, broadly defined, includes the tools, techniques and theoretical underpinnings for enabling machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to be applied to large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and distributed data sets in order to extract useful information and knowledge. Machine learning and AI have already led to significant successes in many health-related fields including medical image classification, segmentation, prediction and decision making. The field of data science promises to accelerate the applications and successes, specifically by enabling the scaling to “big” and heterogenous data.