caBIG® is Helping to Make Health Care Personal
Personalized health care—a paradigm that promises to empower our medical system to deliver predictive, preventative, and truly individualized care—is changing the way medical care is provided in the United States. This change is being driven by innovations in health care information technologies, which are critical components in making this shift from reactive to proactive care a reality.
In a recently published report entitled, “Personalized Health Care: Pioneers, Partnerships, Progress,” the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) cited the importance of information technology to the ongoing evolution and adoption of personalized health care.1 DHHS Secretary Michael O. Leavitt, in his introduction to the report, cited interoperable health information technology as one of four “cornerstones” of personalized medicine, noting that “Increased differentiation of care…will require the ability to aggregate very large volumes of data, through interoperable health information technology—as well as new informatics tools to achieve rapid analysis of the data and propel further research.”
caBIG® continues to make significant contributions to the future of personalized health care through its community-based efforts to develop tools, infrastructure, and standards that allow biomedical information to be readily shared by doctors, patients, and researchers—precisely the type of interoperable health information technology and informatics tools that Secretary Leavitt describes. These contributions were documented in a caBIG® case study commissioned by DHHS for this report and authored by NCI Associate Director for Bioinformatics and Information Technology Ken Buetow, Ph.D.
“[To] address the complexities of cancer and [the] discontinuities of the research process, a 21st century biomedical enterprise requires interoperability; that is, access to integrated tools to collect, analyze, and share data in standardized formats,” Buetow wrote. “This interoperability is a means to link together all the scientists, clinicians, patients, and other participants so that they can share such standardized information rapidly.”
Speaking separately of the report and of personalized health care, Buetow added, “Personalized medicine is all about information. But for information to be useful, it has to be accessible. What we are doing with caBIG® is facilitating accessibility through interoperability, essentially creating an environment where information can be exchanged, integrated, and acted upon.”
1 “Personalized Health Care: Pioneers, Partnerships, Progress.” Personalized Health Care Initiative. US Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.hhs.gov/myhealthcare/news/phc_2008_report.pdf. Accessed 18 November 2008.
