As a person who lives with a chronic disease, I (selfishly) feel especially close to and compelled by the work we do at 5AM. In theory, I want to do everything I can to help the really brilliant people out there who are seeking to cure disease, find better treatments, simplify, share, find, help, fund...make human health better. I want our technologies to help facilitate greatness. In practice, our work can still feel pretty removed from helping people, let alone improving health – when you’re working on a service to support ISO 21090 data types in HL7 messaging, it takes deliberation to recall that that service will be used by a researcher seeking answers in the massive amount of public data that’s out there in the world.
In dark moments, when I feel like a pincushion and consider my doctors vampires, that remove feels too vast – I (selfishly) want to be in there, I want to be doing something now to find a cure, relieve suffering, fix it. But I’m a software geek, not a scientist. So I remember that there’s a great need for technology in all of this. That’s why we founded 5AM – because we created research software for a hospital (it’s still in use today), using our software expertise to help the researchers more effectively manage their research, and better see the information in their data. It was amazingly simple – there was a need! – we could help! – and that’s still the case today. And will be the case for a long time, really, until our collective work is done.
Below are some of my go-to feel-good reminders of why we do the work we do. What’s so great about life science technology? What’s so great about science software? What’s so great about Health IT? Here are some reasons we work in this field…
In dark moments, when I feel like a pincushion and consider my doctors vampires, that remove feels too vast – I (selfishly) want to be in there, I want to be doing something now to find a cure, relieve suffering, fix it. But I’m a software geek, not a scientist. So I remember that there’s a great need for technology in all of this. That’s why we founded 5AM – because we created research software for a hospital (it’s still in use today), using our software expertise to help the researchers more effectively manage their research, and better see the information in their data. It was amazingly simple – there was a need! – we could help! – and that’s still the case today. And will be the case for a long time, really, until our collective work is done.
Below are some of my go-to feel-good reminders of why we do the work we do. What’s so great about life science technology? What’s so great about science software? What’s so great about Health IT? Here are some reasons we work in this field…
- Because sharing information increases knowledge, and everyone is starting to get it - witness The Community Health Data Initiative and so many other such efforts.
- Because crowdsourcing has value, and people are willing to share deeply personal information to get answers - as in Patients Like Me.
- Because the HeLA cells are explored in mainstream media (Smithsonian and RadioLab, at least....).
- Because the Personal Genome Project pushes the idea of the personal and the value of the genome to a new extreme.
- Because the dream/hope/idea of personalized medicine continues to diffuse (in the media and collaboratives).
- Because doctors and patients distill the meaning of "healthIT" to its essence. And blog about it! (Dr. Val et al, Dr. Halamka....)
- Personal gene sequencing? $1000. Home-made PCR? Priceless.
- Because dancing people make us smile.
- Because genetic sequencing is so accepted, we’ll use it to determine dog-poop violators.
