by Angela Guess
Anthony Brino of Healthcare IT News reports, “The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is putting a fresh emphasis on health informatics, with Director Francis Collins, MD, creating a new advisory position and recruiting an associate director for Data Science. Collins, a physician and geneticist, said there’s recently been an ‘exponential growth of biomedical research data’ from genomics, imaging and electronic health records, with the new position being focused on building the NIH’s related research projects.”
According to Brino, Collins stated, “There is an urgent need and increased opportunities for advanced collaboration and coordination of access to, and analysis of, the rapidly expanding collections of biomedical data… NIH aims to play a catalytic lead role in addressing these complex issues — not only internally, but also with stakeholders in the research community, other government agencies, and private organizations involved in scientific data generation, management and analysis.”
Brino continues, “Not unlike the Office of the National Coordinator, the NIH is trying to foster collaboration in an ecosystem of numerous commercial and public projects, as a way to help grow certain subfields. In the early 2000s, the NIH helped create and fund national centers of biomedical computing. One of those, the University of Michigan’s center for integrative bioinformatics, recently spun-off into a part of an international public-private pharmaceutical and genomic research project, called tranSMART.”
photo credit: NIH
