Breakthrough Knowledge of Disease
Just as our nation looked in awe of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the dream of space exploration became a reality. Today we are looking at huge volumes of digital data to extract knowledge and insights about disease and treatment. By huge, we mean a terabyte or even larger, moving towards a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of data. Within less than year of the National Institutes of Health receiving $200 million in funding for the International 1000 Genomes Project, researchers were able to validate a scientific discovery related to Alzheimer’s disease. This “big data” project is expected to contain the world’s largest set of data on human genetic variation, and aims to sequence the entire genome of 2,600 people from around the world. The data is supported by a cloud storage system hosted by Amazon Web Services. A cloud up in sky? Not exactly, the data is on hundreds of remote servers in off-site data centers. With the genomic data publicly available to researchers on the cloud, a huge benefit is that information can be retrieved quickly and inexpensively. The AWS “big data cloud” is beginning to show signs of its true potential as biomedical data from genomics, imaging and electronic health records continues to grow. This past summer, Dr. Stephen Sherry, Chief of the National Center Biotechnology Information, was able to confirm a recent discovery of a rare genetic mutation that may offer protection against Alzheimer’s disease. For 2013, NIH continues to promote innovative health informatics and in addition, seeks to hire a new Data Scientist.
It’s All About the Patient and Spend
The hospitals and the insurance companies are finally putting on their moon boots on and taking their first steps together into uncharted Big Data territory. Last week, the Mayo Clinic and Optum, the health IT unit of UnitedHealth, announced they will share 5 million clinical records covering 15 years of medical treatments and claims data on 100 million patients going back 20 years. So far the Mayo-Optum “big data” project is the largest joint effort to fully understand the healthcare delivery system, with a focus on answer big healthcare questions on best practices, better patient care and affordable cost. Unlike other large healthcare organizations, Optum and the Mayo Clinic will publicly release all results to benefit patients everywhere. Retrospective-longitudinal data tracks pre and post hospitalizations, and is pivotal for studying high cost conditions such as congestive heart failure. What is truly exciting is that such information story boards the patient care processes and disease triggers enabling researchers to understand why heart failure patients are readmitted. Claims data tracks encounter-level activity such as what has been done to the patient and where have they gone for care, whereas clinical data is good for tracking the outcomes of those encounters such as what is the condition of the patient and what has been the result of the encounters. Several research goals include finding optimal treatment protocols, studying variations in care and examining different patient care programs. Also high on the list is cost effectiveness of medical devices, Hepatitis C detection and understanding health disparities among the elderly.
Breakthrough Knowledge of Disease
Just as our nation looked in awe of Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, the dream of space exploration became a reality. Today we are looking at huge volumes of digital data to extract knowledge and insights about disease and treatment. By huge, we mean a terabyte or even larger, moving towards a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of data. Within less than year of the National Institutes of Health receiving $200 million in funding for the International 1000 Genomes Project, researchers were able to validate a scientific discovery related to Alzheimer's disease. This "big data" project is expected to contain the world's largest set of data on human genetic variation, and aims to sequence the entire genome of 2,600 people from around the world. The data is supported by a cloud storage system hosted by Amazon Web Services. A cloud up in sky? Not exactly, the data is on hundreds of remote servers in off-site data centers. With the genomic data publicly available to researchers on the cloud, a huge benefit is that information can be retrieved quickly and inexpensively. The AWS "big data cloud" is beginning to show signs of its true potential as biomedical data from genomics, imaging and electronic health records continues to grow. This past summer, Dr. Stephen Sherry, Chief of the National Center Biotechnology Information, was able to confirm a recent discovery of a rare genetic mutation that may offer protection against Alzheimer's disease. For 2013, NIH continues to promote innovative health informatics and in addition, seeks to hire a new Data Scientist.
It's All About the Patient and Spend
The hospitals and the insurance companies are finally putting on their moon boots on and taking their first steps together into uncharted Big Data territory. Last week, the Mayo Clinic and Optum, the health IT unit of UnitedHealth, announced they will share 5 million clinical records covering 15 years of medical treatments and claims data on 100 million patients going back 20 years. So far the Mayo-Optum "big data" project is the largest joint effort to fully understand the healthcare delivery system, with a focus on answer big healthcare questions on best practices, better patient care and affordable cost. Unlike other large healthcare organizations, Optum and the Mayo Clinic will publicly release all results to benefit patients everywhere. Retrospective-longitudinal data tracks pre and post hospitalizations, and is pivotal for studying high cost conditions such as congestive heart failure. What is truly exciting is that such information story boards the patient care processes and disease triggers enabling researchers to understand why heart failure patients are readmitted. Claims data tracks encounter-level activity such as what has been done to the patient and where have they gone for care, whereas clinical data is good for tracking the outcomes of those encounters such as what is the condition of the patient and what has been the result of the encounters. Several research goals include finding optimal treatment protocols, studying variations in care and examining different patient care programs. Also high on the list is cost effectiveness of medical devices, Hepatitis C detection and understanding health disparities among the elderly.
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