The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) recently released their latest report to the President and Congress. PCAST is an advisory group with leading scientists and engineers directly offering advice to the President.
“Ensuring Leadership in Federally Funded R&D Information Technology” www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/nitrd_report_aug_2015.pdf is a congressionally mandated assessment of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) www.nitrd.gov program. The report focuses on R& D areas to include cybersecurity, IT and Health, Big Data and Data-Intensive Computing, IT and the Physical World, and High Capacity Computing.
In the section on IT and Health, specific findings are listed:
- There is a growing community of IT researchers who are actively developing technologies at the frontier of IT and healthcare, primarily with support from NSF and NIH
- Barriers in gaining access to health data for research purposes and the lack of sufficient data interoperability inhabits many opportunities for health IT research
- Few standards exist that ensure interoperability and healthcare innovation is limited in being able to develop new technologies rapidly
- Many innovations do not fit naturally into either clinical or basic science methodologies making it difficult to acquire the resources necessary to translate work into clinical settings making private investment is difficult to attract
PCAST recommends that NSF, HHS, NIH, DARPA, DOD and other agencies continue to support foundational research in health IT. NSF, HHS, NIH, and NIST should develop and nurture open interfaces, standards, plus incentives to support biomedical research. Also, NIH and HHS should create funding mechanisms to encourage accelerated deployment, testing, and evolution of translational IT systems for clinical use.
PCAST suggests the following research areas that should be emphasized in the coming years:
- The development of new systematic science approaches to support the study of treatments and outcomes of individual and groups of patients as complements and as replacements to randomized controlled trials
- The exploitation of advances in mobile and biometric technologies to create new approaches to patient monitoring, outpatient care, and patient-provider interactions especially to help the chronically ill
- The development of advanced surgical robots, smart interventional systems, or patient-focused and provider-focused sensing technologies that could fuel new systems and workflow models
- Technologies, platforms, and programs acquiring and sharing data, need to be able to incorporate strong protections on the inappropriate use of personal data while adhering to regulations and privacy
- Research the methods needed to reduce data complexity and provide actionable decision support to health practitioners, patients, and healthcare administrators