Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

Legacy systems are often misunderstood by both executives and technology lovers. The views are often stark, with vehement opinions expressed that pivot around the voice being heard and who has been around long enough to know why it was purchased, built, or bought in the first place. Some will scream “it’s dated,” that “we can’t maintain it,” or “it has to go” -- while others bark that “our business is tuned to it,” that “it meets our compliance needs,” or “there is nothing in the market that can do exactly what this does!” Over time, other dependencies grow attached to these systems, which make change even harder to visualize and wrap your arms around. This is particularly true in 5AM’s fields of choice, where rapid change is the norm across technology, science, and medicine, adding to the pressure cooker where those advances appear to be within one’s grasp but remain elusive. This is true even when paper is the legacy system--and it often is. So how can you move forward and not be trapped when your organization begins to see the end of life for a legacy system?

A few weeks back the Obama Administration released a blueprint for the national bioeconomy. Five strategic objectives were outlined that resonate with what we have been learning from our past, current, and prospective clients and partners - paraphrased below

I had been recently working through the training videos and associated labs to get my TCAD certification (which I completed thanks to some free takes associated with the Titanium 2.0 release) and found that one of the little things I had done in my local data lab was pretty nice, and I thought worth sharing. Most languages have ways of being able to execute common code or setting things up--with Java you’ve got Aspects or Injection--but the problem is that you’ve got to add additional technologies to your stack to make things really work. One of the nice things about JavaScript is that the language is so flexible and amazingly robust right out of the box—one of these features is the ability to wrap functions.

I am a person living with a chronic illness, a technophile, and an employee of a software company that specializes in healthcare/health IT and research. So, I have some thoughts about how mobile apps can serve people with health needs. As a user and developer of health-related mobile apps, I’ve identified five things that should be mindfully considered:

April is a good month to step back and think a little bit about one of my favorite subjects: DNA. April 20th is National DNA Day. Organized by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the day commemorates the completion of the Human Genome Project in April 2003, and the discovery of DNA's double helix. I would like to share a few of my thoughts on this incredible and still mysterious molecule.

5AM is thrilled to be playing a part in the upcoming 2012 Sage Bionetworks Commons Congress in San Francisco, April 20-21. The aim of the Congress is to positively impact the pace at which medical research operates. 5AM was founded with similar goals, principles, and themes, so our participation in the Congress is natural – to speed the path of discovery in disease and treatment of patients requires knowledge, assessment, sharing, and visualization of lots of data, and we believe that software’s a great way to do that. We were happy to work with John Wilbanks (one of Sage’s Directors and a Fellow of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation) on a project that will be unveiled at this year’s Congress: Portable Legal Consent.

Performing research for any disease takes hard work, but it is nearly impossible to conduct ground-breaking research and advance science in an expedient manner without a solid starting point--The specimens. The raw material for most of the good work to happen in the life sciences can likely be found in ample quantities of quality-controlled and well-catalogued specimens linked to information about the person from whom they came and their health status. Simply put, a shortage of properly documented biospecimens slows down progress and delays discovery. The roadblocks to effective biobanking--though many are seemingly simple--are painful, and they need to be addressed. Here are the top five challenges always front of my mind when trying to conceptualize and develop software to remove these barriers to specimen acquisition.  

“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” is certainly not a new book—it became a celebrated best seller almost immediately after it was published in early 2010—but the read was new to me. I decided to take it in this week when I heard the author, Rebecca Skloot, will be coming to my town (Frederick, Maryland) to give a grant-funded talk at the Weinberg Center on April 19th. Exposed daily to the fusion of life science and technology here at 5AM—even in the less technical marketing and communications realm where my particular specialty lies—I was of course familiar with the basic facts of the Henrietta Lacks story: Decades ago, a doctor at Johns Hopkins harvested tumor cells from an unsuspecting African-American female who died from cervical cancer, observed the cells flourishing/replicating at an amazing rate, they distributed these “HeLa” cells to fellow researchers, others replicated them on a grand scale, and researchers worldwide have used them almost immediately (and ever since, fast-forward 60 years) to advance science and improve human health in some pretty spectacular ways.

Friday, March 16^th, marked the release of CONNECT 3.3, an open source product that enables health information exchange, securely, across the Internet. This product is used by Health Information Exchange (HIE) organizations, hospitals, healthcare institutions, and government agencies around the world. The release of CONNECT 3.3 is important news to healthcare, as the software helps the country achieve the goal of sharing medical information to improve healthcare and lower costs. CONNECT’s release also was a big day for several of us at 5AM Solutions. For nearly the past year, several colleagues and I have been working tirelessly on the CONNECT project, which is a program of the Federal Health Architecture (FHA), an E-Government initiative managed by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. Assembling and implementing the varied requirements of several government agencies, the open source community, and standards bodies sometimes led to late nights and long days. We enjoyed the work and the people we got to work with, but being a software engineer often means that you are down in the trenches, which can cause you to lose perspective on the big picture of what you are working on. After the release last week, we had the opportunity to lift our heads up and once again look at what CONNECT really means to healthcare.

The Surgeon General's "My Family Health Portrait" -- a tool developed by 5AM and a team of collaborators -- was recently referenced in the the book "The End of Illness" by David B. Agus. Dr. Agus is professor of medicine and Engineering at USC Keck School of medicine. He is the founder of Oncology.com and served as attending physician and as head of the Laboratory of Tumor Biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In "The End of Illness," Agus suggests that as a society we should change our view of health and wellness, and offers that we have been thinking about our bodies in an incorrect manner. One interesting concept the author addresses is how certain diseases and conditions can be addressed through early detection and changes to habits and lifestyle. Essentially, we shouldn't focus on the late stage solution for a particular condition if it is possible to prevent the condition to begin with. Agus suggests natural behavioral "prescriptions" -- such as wearing a comfortable pair of shoes and eating lunch at the same time every day -- can improve one's health. He also explores the positive and negative consequences of different drugs and the statistics behind the change in death rates of particular conditions over the last few decades as certain drugs have been introduced to the market.