The following is a guest blog post from Seth Berkowitz, MD, who authors many of the innovative apps in the BIDMC Crowdsourcing program: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has developed BIDMC@home, a new app for engaging patients using Apple’s CareKit and ResearchKit frameworks and the HealthKit API. The app provides a flexible framework to help patients manage their health from home, as directed by their physicians. The app will be piloted in several specific patient populations and will eventually be offered to BIDMC’s entire network of over 250,000 patients...
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are quickly becoming a critical tool for healthcare organizations looking to build interoperable connections, and it is likely that this new standard for health data exchange will keep growing in importance during the next few years. A new report from Market Research Engine (MRE) predicts healthy growth for the nascent healthcare API ecosystem, forecasting a 4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that will produce a $234 million market by 2024....
An “open-source” approach to accelerating human health advances is the common theme among a diverse group of medical science projects that have won six science awards honoring “excellence in participant-centered research” - a rapidly emerging field that aims to turn patients and healthy people into more active and more data-sharing participants in medical research. The awards will be given out at Harvard Medical School in Boston on April 25 at a scientific convening called GET Conference (“GET” stands for “Genomes, Environments, Traits”). “The winners of the GETy Awards are at the forefront of a research revolution that will radically accelerate the rate of human health advances,” says Jason Bobe, organizer of the GET Conference, and Executive Director of the nonprofit PersonalGenomes.org.
Apple, Inc. has a remarkable ability to capture the world’s attention when announcing “the next big thing.” They have honed their well-known Reality Distortion Field skills for over 30 years...ResearchKit has grabbed such attention. Maybe not as much as The Watch, but amongst the minority of us who pay attention to such things. And the reactions have been typically polarized—it’s either an “ethics quagmire” or “Apple fixing the world.” But reality rarely presents an either-or proposition...
The trend of open collaboration has led to innovation across multiple industries. For decades, big pharma has been known as conservative and slow to change. Today however, there is a growing movement toward open access and crowdsourcing scientific information to accelerate research and development. Open-source platforms have let developers create multiple crowdsourcing applications, that are further enabling the crowdsourcing trend in the life sciences industry, as well.
Two major pharmaceutical companies are using Apple's ResearchKit open-source project in experiments aimed at helping medical researchers gain more data and fresh insights as they seek ways to battle human diseases and illnesses. Pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline confirmed its work in a July 10 tweet, saying the company is "looking @ Apple's #ResearchKit for clinical trials," while Purdue Pharma also said it is exploring early possible uses of ResearchKit in its own drug research, according to a July 12 story by Buzzfeed.