Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

The Network for Public Health Law is holding their 2012 Public Health Law conference this week in Atlanta, focusing on the Practical Approaches to Critical Challenges in Public Health Law, and I have been in attendance. Having worked in healthcare for over fifteen years, and reflecting upon the topics thus far, it was clear that we all go about our daily lives working hard and doing everything we can to accomplish our projects in Health IT with efficiency, and effectiveness, intent upon delivering value to our customers. But what struck me, was how little we really take time to think about the impact the work we are doing has upon our individual lives and those of our families. 

In 2009, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) act was created (as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) to stimulate the migration of medical records from a paper model to an electronic one. HITECH includes Meaningful Use (MU), which are guidelines to encourage and enforce the use of electronic health records (EHRs) by doctors, clinics, hospitals, and care delivery systems throughout the country. There are three key components that define meaningful use:

It’s clear from recent progress that DNA sequencing will soon become commonplace in medical care – it already is widely used in biomedical research. DNA sequencing costs have dropped and will soon be at $1,000 or less for an entire human genome. The cost of interpreting that data is being debated but it will no doubt drop as well. There are some important things that need to happen before sequencing for medical use can become commonplace. I’ll discuss a couple of the most critical ones below.

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.