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Blog: Translational bioinformatics in the era of real-time biomedical, health care and wellness data streams

I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.

-- Steve Jobs

Translational bioinformatics is swiftly developing as "the discipline that will enable the seamless merge of high-dimensional biology and medicine" via health/clinical/bio/medical informatics. We recently wrote a perspective on how medicine and technology could converge seamlessly with the influx of "big-data" from genomics, proteomics (...*-omics), healthy volunteers/patient generated data from sensors, mobile phones, internet of healthcare-things (IoHT)... If you are in one part of the spectrum of healthcare (biology-medicine-wellness), please read it and let me know your thoughts.

HTML here: Translational bioinformatics in the era of real-time biomedical, health care and wellness data streams and PDF is here.

healthcare wellness data-science
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updated by Ram Ram • written by Khader Shameer Khader Shameer

2 answers

Congrats on the nice paper Khader. One issue comes to mind. Is there a software engineering standard or evaluation practice that is to be followed when it comes to developing programs that process information used clinical decision making? What can and cannot be trusted? How is liability handled?

I will also mention my personal opinion: translational bioinformatics is so important and transformative that every major player wants to ensure they will be part of it. Yet we have all seen how this digital transformation often pans: out Facebook, Twitter, Uber etc how the first mover tries to dominate all others. Hence most health care providers will have no vested interest in cooperating in data sharing, standardization etc.

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written by Istvan Albert Istvan Albert

"All your BaseSpace are belong to us."

God that makes me so mad just thinking about it. BAM files locked with DRM. Command-line-adverts. Link your jeegnome.io account (or some other terrible play on words) with your Facebook account for 10 in-game credits for Pig Mansion or whatever app is trending of Facebook these days. Database gets hacked and it causes generations of damage. Google starts sending me adverts based on my SNPs. I'm not even kidding, it's stuff like that which will set healthcare back 10 years and we won't even know it...

I wouldn't even trust my own mother with my genome. Well... maybe half of it.

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written by John John

Thanks, Istvan!

Regulation of clinical decision systems/software is in place/progress (See SOFTWARE Act). Biomedical informatics software or clinical decision system that handle patient data will go through the regulatory process akin to CLIA but designed for software/pipelines. PrecisionFDA efforts to benchmark pipelines is another example where genomic analyses pipelines can compete and get recognition for quality and efficiency. We discussed these aspects briefly in the article, but additional structured evaluation guidelines for rigorous evaluation of translational bioinformatics pipelines/procedures are needed.

I agree with your observation on how digital transformation examples highlight "cute" apps to glorify the technological advances. It is indeed unfortunate to see that data sharing is deemed as "parasitic", but glad to see the fitting reply too. We need such dialogues to improve the scenario and make it open. I think the old model of enterprise-wide closed architecture is gone. Soon, the data silos will be opened and hospitals/health systems will embrace federated search, machine learning and translational bioinformatics will be driving these.

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written by Khader Shameer Khader Shameer

Heartiest congratulations Shameer et al. A very good paper indeed.

It would be nice to see geneaological information attributed to this. At this age of MYID.com it is time developing countries like India incorporated geneaology, patient care data linked to general practitioners.

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written by Prash • Prash

Thanks Prash, agree with you. Developing technologies and making them accessible and sustainable to global public health/healthcare community is important. It is vital to improve the implementation of translational bioinformatics across a different spectrum of healthcare delivery.

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written by Khader Shameer Khader Shameer

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