To use big data to revolutionize healthcare and wellness is the focus for the new Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance www.healthdataalliance.com just announced by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) www.cmu.edu, the University of Pittsburgh www.pitt.edu, and UPMC www.upmc.com a health provider and insurer.
The new research centers at CMU and Pitt are being funded with $10 to $20 million per year over the next six years by UPMC. Also, the Centers will benefit from several hundred million dollars in existing research grants at all three institutions.
The Alliance funded by UPMC will work with Pitt-led and CMU-led centers to transform the explosion of health related data into new technologies, products, and services to change the way diseases are prevented. The Alliance will also look at how patients are diagnosed, treated, and engage in their own care.
The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance will include CMU’s “Center for Machine Learning and Health” (CMLH) www.ml.cmu.edu to be led by Founding Director Eric Xing, PhD, a CMU professor in the Department of Machine Learning.
The CMLH will work on challenging problems at the intersections of healthcare and machine learning. Data from sources as varied as EMRs, genomic sequencing, insurance records, and wearable sensors will be used to directly improve healthcare.
The Center will focus on big healthcare data analytics, personalized medicine and disease modeling, issues of privacy, security and compliance, data driven patient and provider education and training, and a new general framework for big data in healthcare.
For example, imagine a smart phone app that suggests the single dietary change that will most improve your health based on you genetic makeup and medical history. Or suppose a physician receives an automatic alert when a patient enters the earliest stages of rejecting a transplanted organ and is able to react while the condition is most easily treatable.
A near term project at CMLH will work to develop an automated patient diagnosis system. A doctor could query the system to determine the possible diagnoses for a set of symptoms and lab findings and possibly suggest additional questions for the physician to ask the patient or tests that might be ordered
The Alliance will also include the Center “Commercial Applications (CCA) for Healthcare Data” spearheaded by Michael Becich, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics www.dbmi.pitt.edu at the University of Pittsburgh. The Center will invent new technology for potential use in commercial theranostics and imaging systems for patients and doctors to be based on intelligently engineered big data solutions.
CCA will focus on personalized medicine for understanding diseases such as cancer and various lung disorders, genomics, imaging data, methods for data capture, and healthcare analytics. The key goal is to create new technologies and methods to create actionable information.
UPMC Enterprises www.upmc.com/about/enterprises/pages/default.aspx, the commercialization arm of UPMC will lead the effort to turn innovative ideas into new for-profit companies and jobs building on nearly 20 years of investing in and growing companies that solve healthcare problems.