The White House is casting a wide net for activities aimed at advancing President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative.
In a blog post this past week on the White House website, DJ Patil, deputy chief technology officer for data policy and chief data scientist in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Stephanie Devaney, project manager for the initiative, lay out the next steps for the initiative.
They called on everyone to get involved in pushing the initiative forward.
[See also: Meet the 19 members of President Obama's Precision Medicine team.]
"Moving precision medicine forward must be a team effort," Patel and Devaney write. "We need all sectors to work together. We need people to actively engage in research and voluntarily choose to share their data with responsible researchers who are working to understand health and disease."
President Obama launched the initiative in his State of the Union speech on Jan. 20, 2015.
"I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine -- one that delivers the right treatment at the right time," he said in his address.
"In some patients with cystic fibrosis, this approach has reversed a disease once thought unstoppable," he said. "So tonight, I'm launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier. We can do this."
Six months later, the White House is looking specifically for "activities" to help the initiative gain steam. Patel and Devanny provided a laundry list of possibilities:
- New approaches for deploying precision medicine into patient care to improve health.
- New ways to engage patients, participants, and partners in research, and get the word out about PMI, including through the use of novel technologies.
- The deployment of innovative ways of including historically excluded and underserved populations in research.
- The development of robust APIs in electronic health record systems that can support patients accessing their clinical data and donating it for research.
- The creation of workable models of information sharing across organizational boundaries with appropriate privacy and security protections.
- Technology to support the storage and analysis of large amounts of data, with strong security safeguards.
- Novel analytics to help combine diverse data sets with appropriate privacy and security protections to answer precision medicine questions.
- New solutions for security issues in building large research data sets.
- Steps to increase the number of high quality data scientists and technologists working in healthcare.
- The development of grand challenges, competitions, and prizes to foster innovation.
There is a place to share the ideas, and a deadline to meet: 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Sept. 21, 2015.
[See also: What Obama's precision medicine plan needs to succeed.]
