R. Mark Adams is a Principal at Booz Allen Hamilton with extensive experience delivering solutions in bioinformatics across government and commercial healthcare markets.
- Describe the intersection between bioinformatics and trust.
- Bioinformatics involves the use of computers for the collection, storage, management and analysis of biomedical data. Taking information from clinical trials, treatment and the associated sensitive, identifiable data requires that organizations manage risks consistent with regulatory, privacy and intellectual property protection. It is extremely important that patients, caregivers and other stakeholders can be identified securely, reproducibly and accurately and that physicians and researchers can rely upon or “trust” that the information is accurate..
- What challenges do public and private sector organizations face in using bioinformatics to understand and improve biological processes?
- Bioinformatics is an intrinsically interdisciplinary effort. Researchers and subject-matter experts with backgrounds in medicine, computational analysis, biotechnology and information technology work together to collect and analyze informatics data which serves physician -and patient- needs. In addition to managing large volumes of patient information, a prominent challenge is ensuring that data collected in all these different ways remains consistent when it is ultimately integrated into useful results. This requires applying the trust framework wherein, for example, patients can be identified securely, reproducibly and accurately.
- What is the trust framework?
- In order to facilitate medical research and make the medical process more dynamic, researchers create secured identities for patients who consent to allow access to their treatment and other medical records. The trust framework is a mechanism whereby multiple patients can be assigned secure and private identities and control access to their selected information. Key clinical guidelines can be developed based on this kind of treatment-data accessed by physicians and researchers. The trust framework allows patient treatment information to be identified securely, repeatedly and reproducibly.
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