Experts often compare how slowly the health care system is "reforming" to how hard it is to turn a battleship.  They're so big that they can't turn on a dime (much less on $3 trillion!), and there is as much risk in trying to oversteer as in not turning at all.  Things are changing, we're assured, but it will take time to get on the desired new course. Maybe.  But maybe it is time to jump off the obsolete battleship onto something more nimble. Some call it Do-It-Yourself Health (there are both .org and .com sites devoted to the topic, among others).  PwC declared it to be one of the top ten trends of 2015.  Dave Chase believes that "DIY health reform is now leading the way for the highest performing reform" -- not Medicare, health insurers, not even employers...
The Genomic Data Commons, a next-generation platform that enables unprecedented data access, analysis and sharing for cancer research, publicly launched at the University of Chicago on June 6, opening the door to discoveries for this complex set of diseases. The Genomic Data Commons went live with approximately 4.1 petabytes of data from National Cancer Institute-supported research programs, including some of the largest and most comprehensive cancer genomics datasets in the world...
Today, StartUp Health, its global army of Health Transformers and Vice President of the United States Joe Biden kicked off the 14th annual Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit sharing an urgent message with nearly 2,000 health leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs: the time is now to organize, break down silos, and adopt a “Health Transformer Mindset” to speed up progress in solving big health challenges like ending cancer, ensuring access to care, and improving the wellbeing of people worldwide...
Today, the Cancer Moonshot is hosting a summit at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. as part of a national day of action that also includes more than 270 events in communities across the United States.  Vice President Joe Biden will join over 350 researchers, oncologists and other care providers, data and technology experts, patients, families, and patient advocates, among others, will come together at Howard University.  They will be joined by more than 6,000 individuals at events in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Guam.  This is the first time a group this expansive and diverse will meet under a government charge is to double the rate of progress in our understanding, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and care of cancer...
A corporate-government partnership to improve U.S. veterans’ access to personalized cancer treatments will highlight a nationwide series of gatherings and events Wednesday detailing of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” program. IBM Corp. will donate access to its “Watson” supercomputer -- best known for beating human champions on the television game show “Jeopardy!” -- to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The supercomputer will help provide facilitate oncology treatment for those who have served in the U.S. military, according to a statement from the White House...
The need to rapidly and efficiently share new data in cancer research was recently, and powerfully, highlighted by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden as part of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) and TransCelerate BioPharma, Inc. (“TransCelerate”) announce today the open availability of a new CDISC Therapeutic Area (TA) Standard for Breast Cancer. The CDISC global TA standards can streamline the way clinical research is conducted so that data can be readily shared among clinicians, researchers and regulators around the world, thus leading to more rapid and “smarter” research...
Health data scientist Fred Trotter presented today at the White House Open Data Innovation Summit around national health data transparency. Trotter is the founder of DocGraph which released the US government’s first national Provider referral pattern data in 2012 that enabled researchers, journalists, and companies around the nation to provide data-backed healthcare solutions...
Every spring, our team in the HHS IDEA Lab gears up for our biggest event of the year: the Health Datapalooza. It’s an annual celebration of the power of data that was started by my predecessor, Todd Park, in 2010. This year, we were honored to hear from an extraordinary lineup of leaders from private industry, academia and the federal government, including Vice President Biden. I thought I’d share excerpts from three of my colleagues’ speeches, to give people a sense of the scope and depth of the discussions.