Interoperability’s Role in Striving for Precision Medicine
Martha Koroshetz President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative in his 2015 State of the Union address, a research effort to find treatments that are tailored to specific genetic profiles and characteristics. This personalized and context-specific treatment approach will require big data analysis of patient outcomes and their genetic sequence, which must then be accessible and comprehensible to caregivers. The initiative must therefore be able to reconcile genetic data, demographic information, and health information, in the electronic health record. To achieve data interoperability, the organizations engaged in the initiative must confront questions of data privacy, standardize data exchange, and incentivize...
Obama’s Broadband Plan
Ben Agatston This July, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), an administrative office within the Executive Office of the President, published a report that highlighted the “digital divide.” Most notably, the report found that a large number of Americans do not use a computer and “substantial disparities in both Internet use and quality of access.” By exploring Figure 3 of the Council of Economic Adviser’s report, “Mapping the Digital Divide,” it becomes clear that rural areas lag behind more densely populated, urban regions. Read Full Text Here