Precision Medicine Initiative

If standards have not been universally adopted in the health care field, and are oftenimplemented incorrectly when adopted, the reason may simply be that good standards are hard to design. A recent study found that mobile health app developers would like to share data, but “Less progress has been made in enabling apps to connect and communicate with provider healthcare systems–a fundamental requirement for mHealth to realize its full value in healthcare management.”Open mHealth faced this challenge when they decided to provide a schema to represent the health data that app developers, research teams, and other individuals want to plug into useful applications. This article is about how they mined the health community for good design decisions and decided what necessary trade-offs to make.

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Andy OramThe previous section of this article looked at how little help we getfrom genetic testing. Admittedly, when treatments have been associated with genetic factors, testing has often been the difference between life and death. Sometimes doctors can hone in with laser accuracy on a treatment that works for someone because a genetic test shows that he or she will respond to that treatment. Hopefully, the number of treatments that we can associate with tests will grow over time. So genetics holds promise, but behavioral and environmental data are what we can use right now...

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Venture Funding for Digital Health in 2015 Reaches 2014 Level
Health information technology is “foundational” to President Obama’s $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative aimed at treating the specific needs and characteristics of individual patients, according to Karen DeSalvo, M.D., national coordinator for HIT. Read More »

Every day, more data about our lives is being generated than ever before. When it comes to saving lives, the bigger the data the better - but what to do with it all? Ninety per cent of the data in the world has been created in the past two years alone, experts estimate - and the reason for that is technological innovation. The internet, mobile phones, cameras, sensors, bank cards and social media are just some of the items responsible for the massive volume of "big data" that is currently amassed every single second...

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The previous section of this article provided whatever detail I could find on the costs of poor communications and data exchange among health care providers. But in truth, it’s hard to imagine the toll taken by communications failures beyond certain obvious consequences, such as repeated tests and avoidable medical errors. One has to think about how the field operates and what we would be capable of with proper use of data. As patients move from PCP to specialist, from hospital to rehab facility, and from district to district, their providers need not only discharge summaries but intensive coordination to prevent relapses. Our doctors are great at fixing a diabetic episode or heart-related event...

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Health technology company Vibrent Health...expands its digital health solutions business into Europe through a partnership with Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Central Nervous System (RADAR-CNS). Vibrent Health will work with the Europe-led consortium on developing digital health programs featuring predictive analytics designed to monitor and help improve treatment for depression, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy. RADAR-CNS is conducting research using a range of medical-grade sensors, such as electro-cardiograms, as well as a growing portfolio of consumer-grade sensors, including accelerometers and smartphone applications, that collect participant data from surveys and smartphone sensors.

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