"medical" entries
Discovering genetic associations using large data
David Heckerman's research uses big datasets to tackle essential health questions.
David Heckerman from Microsoft Research presents a summary of his work in the session “Discovering Genetic Associations on Large Data.” This was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Heckerman’s research attempts to answer essential questions such as “What is your propensity for getting a particular disease?” and “How are you likely to react to a particular drug?”
Key points from Heckerman’s presentation include: Read more…
Combining patient data sets for better medical research
Datalanche and the Practice Fusion challenge
I find Datalanche’s upcoming search application interesting because its database mixes public health data with patients’ clinical data from a private vendor. Practice Fusion opened up their data set of de-identified clinical information for a challenge that Datalanche won last week.
Advanced analytics for all in the health care system
Arijit Sengupta on the benefits of making health care analytics widely accessible within an organization.
Arijit Sengupta presents a summary of his work as the CEO of BeyondCore in the presentation “Advanced Analytics for All: Enabling business users to act on length of stay patterns at a leading hospital system.” This presentation was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Sengupta’s vision is to bring analytics to people throughout an organization who can use them in their work. He hopes to bring analytics that have traditionally been available only to those at the top of a large organization down to those making everyday decisions. Users of analytics should not need to know statistics or computer science. In this presentation, he shows how hospital employees can correlate the length of a hospital stay with other variables.
Key points Sengupta’s session include: Read more…
Privacy concerns and regulatory challenges in personalized medicine
Ann Waldo examines obstacles to patient data and offers specific reforms that can help.
Ann Waldo, a partner in Wittie, Letsche & Waldo, LLP in Washington, DC, presents a summary of her work in the webcast “Overview of Privacy Concerns and Regulatory Challenges Concerning Personalized Medicine — and Some Modest Suggestions for Change.” This was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Waldo highlighted how HIPAA regulations and other laws passed by federal and state governments contain restrictions that make research with patient data unnecessarily difficult. She offers several suggestions for reform.
Key points from her presentation include: Read more…
Challenge to Meaningful Use by House leaders highlights difficulty of asking incumbents to be innovators
Working too closely with an industry can undercut innovation
Four leading members of the House Ways and Means Committee tore away last Thursday at the polite, cautious, incremental approach that the Department of Health and Human Service has been taking toward key goals of HITECH act that was meant to drag health care into the 21st century.
Specifically, the House leaders signaled their disappointment at the Stage 2 Meaningful Use rules, promulgated last August by the Office of the National Coordinator and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Congressmen isolate certain rules that appear to be less stringent than Stage 1, point out that the key goals of interoperability and data exchange are weak, and most notably ask for a total stop to payments made to health care providers under Meaningful Use.
Assessing the real risks of re-identifying patient data
Controversy over a famous privacy research project
Daniel Barth-Jones, an epidemiologist and expert on health data privacy, has published an examination of the sensitive issue of re-identifying patients. This is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the use of patient data for improving health care. He has blogged about his key findings, but I suggest reading his full paper for the recommendations he makes.
Breaking down the data barriers that hold back cancer research
Marcia Kean of Feinstein Kean Healthcare answered a request by the Institute of Medicine to design a better way to do cancer research, and helped write a proposal that led to the establishment of the Data Liquidity Coalition. In this video interview, Kean describes the benefits of data sharing for researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and patients. She describes the goals and initial activities of the coalition, and describes the effects it can have on research, patients, and physicians.
Highlights from the full video interview include:
- Reasons for the Data Liquidity Coalition. [Discussed at the 0:16 mark]
- Origins at the Institute of Medicine. [Discussed at the 1:20 mark]
- Value of data sharing for cancer researchers. [Discussed at the 2:30 mark]
- Value of data sharing for patients and their physicians. [Discussed at the 5:05 mark]
- Proprietary systems and open interfaces. [Discussed at the 6:45 mark]
- Getting patients involved and developing advocates for sharing. [Discussed at the 10:04 mark]
- Clinical studies in an ecosystem of large data sets. [Discussed at the 14:31 mark]
- 15:22 Roles for computer programmers, IT businesses. [Discussed at the 15:22 mark]
- 17:34 Why the time is ripe for data liquidity. [Discussed at the 17:34 mark]
- Role models for data sharing. [Discussed at the 20:03 mark]
The future of medicine relies on massive collection of real-life data
An interview with Shahid Shah
Health care costs rise as doctors try batches of treatments that don’t work in search of one that does. Meanwhile, drug companies spend billions on developing each drug and increasingly end up with nothing to show for their pains. This is the alarming state of medical science today. Shahid Shah, device developer and system integrator, sees a different paradigm emerging. In this interview at the Open Source convention, Shah talks about how technologies and new ways of working can open up medical research.
Analyzing health care data to empower patients
Castlight Health presents their vision of health care consumerism at Strata Rx
The stress of falling seriously ill often drags along the frustration of having no idea what the treatment will cost. We’ve all experienced the maddening stream of seemingly endless hospital bills, and testimony by E-patient Dave DeBronkart and others show just how absurd U.S. payment systems are.
So I was happy to seize the opportunity to ask questions of three researchers from Castlight Health about the service they’ll discuss at the upcoming Strata Rx conference about data in health care.
Castlight casts its work in the framework of a service to employers and consumers. But make no mistake about it: they are a data-rich research operation, and their consumers become empowered patients (e-patients) who can make better choices.
As Arjun Kulothungun, John Zedlewski, and Eugenia Bisignani wrote to me, “Patients become empowered when actionable information is made available to them. In health care, like any other industry, people want high quality services at competitive prices. But in health care, quality and cost are often impossible for an average consumer to determine. We are proud to do the heavy lifting to bring this information to our users.”
Following are more questions and answers from the speakers: Read more…
Clinician, researcher, and patients working together: progress aired at Indivo conference
Open-source SMART platform and Indivo PHR are increasingly integrated
SMART and Indivo offer a far-reaching platform for giving patients access to data and working seemlessly with other cooperating institutions.