Healthcare Data Alliance Formed In Pittsburgh
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The collaboration is designed to transform healthcare through big data.
The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a unprecedented collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC, was formed with the hopes of leveraging big data in order to “revolutionize healthcare and wellness,” according to a press release
The goal of the alliance is to remake healthcare so it is both more personalized and more computerized, as well as capitalize on big data currently available to find new ways of treatment, diagnosis, and access. The idea is that, within ten years, healthcare will be totally transformed and this alliance is designed to help pave the way for the medicine of the future.
The alliance asserts the millions of gigabytes of accumulated health records held by the member institutions could provide information that would lead to more patient-specific methods of predicting and treating health issues, according to the Pittsburgh Gazette. For example, smart data could help hospitals and doctors rapidly detect potential new outbreaks and provide immediate alerts to staff and authorities regarding appropriate actions.
The alliance, funded by UPMC and supported by several hundred million dollars of existing research grants at all three institutions, will see its work carried out by Pitt-led and CMU-led centers, with participation from all three institutions. According to the Pittsburgh Business Times, UPMC president and CEO Jeffrey Romoff said the partnership has the potential to unleash “the next generation of healthcare, the next generation of IT and the next generation of Pittsburgh” and the city’s three leading research institutions hope to create “an extraordinary amount of opportunity and wealth.”
“The complementary strengths of the alliance’s partner institutions will allow us to re-imagine health care for millions of people in our shared, data-driven world,” said Subra Suresh, president of CMU. “Through this collaboration, we will move more rapidly to immediate prevention and remediation, further accelerate the development of evidence-based medicine, and augment disease-centered models with patient-centered models of care.”
“Our vision is this is totally transformative,” Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher added. “We are positioning ourselves to be at the forefront of this innovation.”