Eight months after it kicked off an ambitious $100 million, five year project to create a data warehouse and enterprise analytics initiative for a personalized medicine program, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is beginning to see some payoff.
In the first test of its data warehouse, researchers have electronically integrated clinical and genomic information on 140 patients previously treated for breast cancer, according to a statement from the medical center. It wants to find out whether there’s a difference between breast cancer that develops before the onset of menopause and after. So far, researchers from University of Pittsburgh have found “intriguing molecular differences” between these two cancers, findings it believes could eventually help provide a roadmap for developing targeted therapies.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Oracle, IBM, Informatica and dbMotion collaborated on the program with UPMC to set up the data warehouse, designed to knock down silos and integrate data to produce more meaningful research.
Dr. Adrian Lee, the director of the Women’s Cancer Research Center at University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and Magee-Womens Research Institute, said integrating clinical, genomic, proteomic, imaging and financial data will help it pose questions that it couldn’t ask before and make it easier to research other cancer types and conditions.
Although it’s very much in its formative years, personalized medicine has been embraced by the pharmaceutical industry as a way to develop more targeted drugs and dosages to optimize outcomes as the era of blockbuster drugs begins to fade away. Data analytics tools play a major role in supporting personalized medicine research of the enormous amount of data that needs to be organized and put into context. If the examples of the Mayo Clinic and Coriell Institute are anything to go on, perhaps UPMC will look at spinning off this entity and offer it as a support service for drug developers.
