How big is the potential of big data in healthcare? So enormous that three Ohio medical powerhouses have teamed up, set aside some $21.5 million and called on a noted computational geneticist to lead a venture that will bolster their ability to find meaning from it.
Case Western Reserve University is spearheading a new Institute of Computational Biology in partnership with Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals. The goal? First, to aggregate and de-identify information collected in different parts of the hospitals (clinical notes, lab tests, billing data and proteomic, genomic and metabolomics data). Then, organize it in a way that allows for researchers to discover new insights that could improve the hospitals’ quality of care.
“We’ve essentially gotten an OK from Cleveland Clinic and UH to work on how we’re going to do that in a secure way, so that we’re appropriately dealing with privacy and confidentiality,” said Jonathan L. Haines, the director of the new institute. He emphasized the importance of that collaboration in drawing him to the initiative.
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Case recruited Haines from Vanderbilt University, where he helped build the biological repository linked to Vanderbilt’s medical records database. He also led research teams working to identify genes involved in various diseases, founded the university’s Center for Human Genetics research and established a doctoral program in human genetics.
At Case Western Reserve, he’ll serve as a professor of genomic sciences and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. When he’s not doing that, he’ll oversee the Institute of Computational Biology, coordinate implementation of hardware infrastructure and help staff the institute with personnel to write and manage software.
Unlike retail or banking, healthcare hasn’t been at the forefront of turning large datasets into useful information. A lot of that, according to Haines, is because medical data has been collected in such different ways. While companies like Google and Amazon started out as electronic entities, hospitals have been creating data on paper for hundreds of years. The shift to electronic medical records, then, has been neither slow nor easy.
As he gets settled into his new position, Haines has a few things on his mind. “One of the things that we’ve not really explored, but is something I would like to work on, is connecting this to environmental data,” he explained. “There’s a lot of information out there about exposures – like carbon monoxide or pollutants in the groundwater – so we could look at what’s going on not just at a biological level, but at the environmental level.”
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That won’t happen just yet, though; it will take a few years to get the infrastructure set up. “We will probably be constantly revising, updating and expanding as new technologies come on board, both in biology and EMR,” Haines said. “I hope in five years we’ll be doing some really cool stuff.”
