Bio IT Alliance: Integrating Health Care from the researchers to the patients

Posted By: Laura Foy | Jun 6th, 2006 @ 5:22 PM

I chat with Don Rule from Microsoft about the Bio IT Alliance, a cross-industry group that helps to make personalized medicine a reality. We talk about the idea of ‘bench to bedside’ medicine, connecting biological science all the way from research to individual health care, and Don shows us a demo of an application from the Scripps Research Institute.

Tags: health, MS Studios, personalized, software

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TheMoose

That was so way over my head!
I like hi tech stuff, but that was so high I couldn't reach it!

If what ever he said will speed up medical care & lower costs then keep up the good work. Smiley

Arztek

Bio IT Alliance certainly looks promising and it really has taken off this past month or so. Anyhing that expidites medical procedure and lowers cost in the healthcare field is worth further development. The most bothersome part of healthcare today is time. It feels though we're always waiting for the test rersults or the doctor to come back from the lab or vacation. It seems to me like doctors are paid entirely too much and have too much free time, but that's just my oppinion. Hopefully, Bio IT Alliance will shave a little more time off procedure, but the doctors may be the only ones gaining that time.

Good segment, Laura.

adownes

Great demo and show. Interesting use of technology. The use of sharepoint to store the data however piqued my interest. For one, one of the biggest challenges in the medical industry is sharing data from experiments and research with other researchers. Usually data is store in databases (public or private) with research specific schemas. Using sharepoint as the backend for the collaboration tool is a interesting alternative.

DonRule

In reply to adownes

#Jun 7th, 2006 @ 3:27 PM

We tried to strike a balance with the level of structure in the application. In general a database application requires major IT involvement to update the schema. Conversly totally unstructured information is easy to maintain but very difficult to find anything. Sharepoint struck a good balance becaue we cand use documents of varying levels of structure, from pure Word documents to InfoPath forms with controlled vocabularies that enable the researchers to store consistent data for projects in consistent ways.

nitzan
nitzan

This is a good example of what the technology can really do to improve bioinformatics generation and collaboration. There are, however, few other alliances - all trying to reach the same goals and we still don't see enough applicable progress. The real value should be if applicable products are generated faster through such alliance and if the industry (pharma, biotech)/healthcare/research communities awareness will be promoted better.

Eventually, the ,market response and acceptance, on a large scale, are they keys to enable developers to continue and their companies make enough resources to support more development and gain further revenues. It is still the main challenge we are all facing at the life sciences technologies ventures.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Thanks!