Policy

White House honors 9 as precision medicine “Champions of Change”

The Champions of Change designation spans a range of issues — from foster care to climate education to those leading local efforts in pushing forward the Affordable Care Act.

The White House has honored nine Americans for being “Champions of Change” in precision medicine.

The Champions of Change designation spans a range of issues — from foster care to climate education to those leading local efforts in pushing forward the Affordable Care Act.

These honors are on par with President Obama’s recent Precision Medicine Initiative — and will be bestowed officially on Wednesday at 2 p.m. EDT — watch here.

Here’s the citizenry commended for “advancing our understanding of health and disease by harnessing data to take account individual differences in people’s genes, environments and lifestyles to improve patients’ health.”

Marcia Boyle

President and founder of the Immune Deficiency Foundation. Under her guidance, the IDF developed an electronic health record specifically for those with immunodeficiency issues — to help folks with these rare diseases better manage their health.

Hugo Campos

A huge proponent of the “data liberación” and e-patient movements, Campos works with Stanford Medicine X, has been an advisory board member for the UC San Diego Calit2 Health Data Exploration Project, and the National Steering Committee for pSCANNER.

Elizabeth Gross Cohn

A nurse and health equity advocate, Cohn is the director of the Center for Health Innovation at Adelphi University. She also holds a leadership role in community engagement at Columbia University Medical Center. She researches the ethical and social issues at the intersection of precision medicine and health disparities.

Amy Gleason

Working as chief operating officer of CareSync, Gleason wants to improve patient access to their health records. After her daughter got diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, Gleason also became vice president of a foundation that supports family and patients with Juvenile Myositis.

Amanda Haddock

Haddock is president and co-founder of the Dragon Master Foundation — meant to improve cancer research tools and technology. She has said her vision is to build an open access, collaborative, multi-institute research infrastructure with innovative informatics and high quality data to employ precision medicine effectively in cancer therapeutics.

Emily Kramer-Golinkoff

A patient, herself, with advanced cystic fibrosis, Kramer-Golinkoff founded nonprofit Emily’s Entourage to raise funding and awareness for the disease. She also works in healthcare social media at University of Pennsylvania.

Howard Look 

Leads a nonprofit called Tidepool that’s meant to improve Type 1 Diabetes treatment through open-source software. He’s a proponent of data liberation and allowing patient access to health records — and through Tidepool allows “intuitive and actionable diabetes applications” come to fruition.

Dorothy Reed

She formed the Sisters Network of Central New Jersey — a breast cancer support system that helps African American women, in particular, deal with their diagnosis. It also helps encourage minority women to get mammograms and learn more about breast health.

Anish Sebastian

The founder and CEO of Babyscripts, a mobile therapeutics company meant to improve prenatal care. The company wirelessly monitors the weight and blood pressure of pregnant women, to allow for early interventions if complications arise.

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