Dennis Rosen, The Boston Globe
“In “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,’’ Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist at Scripps Health and Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, argues that we are on the brink of a revolutionary transformation in which recent technological and scientific advances will enable the personalization of medicine in ways that would have seemed like science fiction only a short while ago.
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Andrew Schorr, HealthWorks Collective
“This month I was honored to be the master of ceremonies at the Personalized Medicine World Conference in Silicon Valley, California. for the second time. About 850 scientists, venture capitalists and physicians attended and most all of them, have many more letters after their name for advanced degrees than I have!
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Brian Ahier, Ahier.net
“Led by researchers at University of Oxford (UK) and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) at Harvard University, (USA), more than 50 collaborators at over 30 scientific organizations around the globe have agreed on a common standard that will make possible the consistent description of enormous and radically different databases compiled in fields ranging from genetics to stem cell science, to environmental studies.
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Janet Fang, Smartplanet
“Cellphones display your vital signs and take ultrasound images of your heart. Genetic scans of malignant cells match your cancer to the most effective treatment. Virtual house calls and remote monitoring could replace doctor visits and even hospitalizations… medicine is on the verge of an overhaul.
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Sharon Begley, Technology Review
“Nanosensors patrolling your bloodstream for the first sign of an imminent stroke or heart attack, releasing anticlotting or anti-inflammatory drugs to stop it in its tracks. Cell phones that display your vital signs and take ultrasound images of your heart or abdomen.
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EurekAlert!
“A new data network that integrates emerging research on the molecular makeup of diseases with clinical data on individual patients could drive the development of a more accurate classification of disease and ultimately enhance diagnosis and treatment, says a new report from the National Research Council. The “new taxonomy” that emerges would define diseases by their underlying molecular causes and other factors in addition to their traditional physical signs and symptoms.
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Eashwar Subramanian, Science 2.0
“At first sight, the hand held tablets and screens hosted on nurse tables and held dearly to the palms of able clinical staff, may appear to be incongruous with the functional obligations of their owners and you could be forgiven to mistake them for Apple’s new iPad.
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Klitzman R. JAMA, 304(10)
Increasingly, physicians and patients face dilemmas of whether to exclude genetic information from medical charts, posing critical challenges for practice, research, policy, and education. Physicians and patients are obtaining more genetic information, yet medical records are rapidly becoming electronic, threatening confidentiality. Tensions thus arise between potential medical benefits vs social risks of including information.
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Katrina Megget, PharmaTimes
“Genetic profiling, infectious disease mapping, digital implants, and talking medicine cabinets – these are but some of the 20 future scenarios Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide has forecast in a new report.
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Suzanne Bohan, Contra Costa Times
“A team of Bay Area researchers faced a Herculean challenge 15 months ago: Sequence the DNA of more than 100,000 Kaiser Permanente members joining an unprecedented study linking health to genetics and environmental conditions.
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Brian Ahier, Ahier.net
“Recruiting thousands of patients to collect health data for genetic clues to disease is expensive and time consuming. But that arduous process of collecting data for genetic studies could be faster and cheaper by instead mining patient data that already exists in electronic medical records, according to new Northwestern Medicine research.
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Kho AN et al, Science Translational Medicine, 3(79)
Clinical data in electronic medical records (EMRs) are a potential source of longitudinal clinical data for research. The Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network (eMERGE) investigates whether data captured through routine clinical care using EMRs can identify disease phenotypes with sufficient positive and negative predictive values for use in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Using data from five different sets of EMRs, we have identified five disease phenotypes with positive predictive values of 73 to 98% and negative predictive values of 98 to 100%.
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Common Ground
“Should we be concerned about DNA testing of our babies in BC or anywhere else for that matter?
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Matthew Herper, Forbes
“Twenty-two years ago Francis Collins, who would go on to head the Human Genome Project and run the National Institutes of Health, was part of a team that found the gene that, when mutated, caused cystic fibrosis, a deadly childhood disease in which the lungs fill with mucus and the pancreas does not make digestive enzymes.
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Ullman-Cullere MH, Mathew JP. Human Mutation, 2011
The Information Technology (IT) roadmap for personalized medicine requires Electronic Health Records (EHRs), extension of Healthcare IT (HIT) standards, and understanding of how genetics/genomics should be integrated into the clinical applications. For reduced overall costs and development times, these three initiatives should run in parallel. EHRs must contain structured data and infrastructure which enables quality analysis, Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and messaging within the healthcare information network. Fortunately, as a result of sustained financial commitment to non-genetic based healthcare, the industry has HIT data standards and understanding of EHR functionality which improves patient safety and outcomes, while reducing overall healthcare costs.
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eHealthNews.eu
“International Genetic Databases to be early beneficiary. The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) has announced a new policy to enable free use of English-language SNOMED CT terms and identifiers in international research databases, in complementary health IT standards, and in other projects and resources available worldwide.
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Patty Enrado, EHRWatch
“Vanderbilt University Medical Center is embarking on an extensive genotyping project that involves checking patients for 184 genetic variations that can produce drug interactions for a broad number of diseases and disorders.
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MedicExchange
“Scientific research published in the current issue of the JAMIA reports on a study of genetic variants that influence human susceptibility to PAD, made possible by leveraging ( EMR s; also called EHR s ).
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CMIO
“EMR-based data, used across institutions in a structured way, offer great potential for diverse research studies, including those related to understanding the genetic bases of common diseases, according to new research published in this month’s Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
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Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have shown that by leveraging electronic medical records they were able to determine genetic variants that influence susceptibility to peripheral arterial disease (PAD), which is associated with “significant mortality and morbidity.”
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