The Precision Medicine Initiative, the Obama administration’s attempt to map the genomes of a million Americans and make the data present to researchers, is about much more than genomics, according to National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, MD.
Acquiring the vision of the PMI will require significant advances in data integration, and NIH is focusing attempts to make advances in this arena.
NIH plans to make a participant technologies center to leverage the ability to collect information from mobile phone and sensor technologies for the study. Collins appreciated that one of the challenges that the PMI cohort must address is how to synthesize EHR, genomic, mHealth, and wearable sensor data.
“We have not been capable to do that kind of integration of all those data types together with electronic health records,” he added. “There are no laws of physics here that will get in the way of our being capable to achieve that. It is just going to be a very tough data wrangling issue.” However, Collins discussed that “if you can make it work for a million people, well you ought to be able to make it work for 330 million” Americans.
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