Life as a Health Data Scientist

Modified from Thomas Wilckens, MD Many of us who work at the interface of cancer clinical research and biomedical informatics were thrilled to hear about the cancer moonshot program from President Obama, announced in his final State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Jan 12, 2016. VP Biden, the nominated leader for this effort, has pledged to increase the resources available to combat the disease, and to find ways for the cancer community to work together and share information, the operative word being “share” (after ‘resources’). In this post, I briefly review four thematic areas where informatics is already playing a key role to help realize cancer moonshot goals and identify challenges and opportunities. Immunotherapies: Recent approvals of ipilimumab (Yervoy), sipuleucel-T (Provenge), Nivolmab (Opdivo) and Pembrolizumab (Keytruda) represent important clinical advances for the field of active immunotherapy in oncology and for patients. Immunoinformatics played a critica...

Photo Photo Credit: Health Data Consortium It was a treat to all data enthusiasts alike! What started out five years ago with an enlightened group of 25 gathered in an obscure forum has morphed into Health Datapalooza which brought 2000 technology experts, entrepreneurs and policy makers and healthcare system experts in Washington DC last week. “It is an opportunity to transform our health care system in unprecedented ways,” said HHS Secretary Burwell during one of the keynote sessions to mark the influence that the datapalooza has had on innovation and policy in our healthcare system. Below are my notes from the 3-day event. Fireside chats with national and international leaders in healthcare and data science were a major attraction. U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil discussed the dramatic democratization of health data access. He emphasized that his team’s mission is to responsibly unleash the power of data for the benefit of the American public a...