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Unifying clinical and biological data is an incredibly challenging task for a variety of reasons. Private sector is much more well suited to tackle such problem

Unifying clinical and biological data is an incredibly challenging task for a variety of reasons. Private sector is much more well suited to tackle such problems because of the engineering and coordination required.

lmeyerov 5y ago
I'd have agreed with you 5-10 years ago. - I'm interacting with and hearing a bunch of regional tech companies, hospital networks, and worse, consultant shops, doing what you're saying. For the most part, they're not that special. There are variants with unique twists (edge compute/ai/crypto/reselling/graph/..), but ultimately, not that many, and generally prioritize the same obvious data sources (epic, ..). Genome data isn't as standardized/centralized as top EHRs afaict, but even there, we're see common data formats crop up & getting popular. Likewise, every hospital network IT group is independently having to reinvent the wheel on things like access for their researchers. - I'm not advocating they do all the things. Industry has value. (Ex: Imagine trifacta for everyone!). But this is a commons issue, and when industry owns it, that's a problem (ex: HHS groups ensnared by Palantir, or today's balkanized approach to real-world data). But for meat and potatoes of EHRs/labs/genomes, as part of the continued digital transform these systems are doing, targeting baseline standards & timely data submission isn't that crazy. Likewise, VA and other ~federated national groups already do have (bad) centralized database + compute facilities. I hear about their problems every ~night ;-) But as a baseline, a lot of what is a scramble today would become easy. Getting back to the main point. The top 5 tech co's are quite used to working at nation/global scale for data stuff, including for PII & AI, so there's technical precedent. Smaller nations actually already do centralize this stuff - so it's not even without precedent in terms of government. The US gov is intentionally spending much more money on doing it much tinier & weaker.

lmeyerov 5y ago

I'd have agreed with you 5-10 years ago. - I'm interacting with and hearing a bunch of regional tech companies, hospital networks, and worse, consultant shops, doing what you're saying. For the most part, they're not that special. There are variants with unique twists (edge compute/ai/crypto/reselling/graph/..), but ultimately, not that many, and generally prioritize the same obvious data sources (epic, ..). Genome data isn't as standardized/centralized as top EHRs afaict, but even there, we're see common data formats crop up & getting popular. Likewise, every hospital network IT group is independently having to reinvent the wheel on things like access for their researchers. - I'm not advocating they do all the things. Industry has value. (Ex: Imagine trifacta for everyone!). But this is a commons issue, and when industry owns it, that's a problem (ex: HHS groups ensnared by Palantir, or today's balkanized approach to real-world data). But for meat and potatoes of EHRs/labs/genomes, as part of the continued digital transform these systems are doing, targeting baseline standards & timely data submission isn't that crazy. Likewise, VA and other ~federated national groups already do have (bad) centralized database + compute facilities. I hear about their problems every ~night ;-) But as a baseline, a lot of what is a scramble today would become easy. Getting back to the main point. The top 5 tech co's are quite used to working at nation/global scale for data stuff, including for PII & AI, so there's technical precedent. Smaller nations actually already do centralize this stuff - so it's not even without precedent in terms of government. The US gov is intentionally spending much more money on doing it much tinier & weaker.