Screening to distraction: Greater focus on the incidentalome

Last week, Gina Kolata of the New York Times summarized a growing controversy around the value of some of the types of medical screening tests currently employed.The salutory effect of this and related articles is a growing awareness of the tradeoff between increased sensitivity and specificity. It also is a shot across the bow as we contemplate the growth in the number of incidental findings that are going to occur as we test hundreds if not thousands of genetic variants today and in the future. Also, today, Gina Kolata reviewed how little we know about diseases as extensively studied as cancer. Some of them do disappear. Do these spontaneously regressed tumors contribute to the surprisingly high false positive rates for screening?

A physician of distinction: Oliver Wendell Holmes

An invitation to celebrate the life, the accomplishments, and the continuing relevance of the literary and scientific contributions of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) spent parts of the nineteenth century as America’s best-known physician and best-selling author. Sir William Osler praised him as “the most successful combination which the world has ever seen, of the physician and man of letters.” Henry James, Sr., called him “intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” Today, he is remembered as a physician for his investigation of the contagiousness of puerperal fever (two decades before the advent of the germ theory), his advocacy for therapeutic skepticism and rationalism, and for coining such terms as “anesthesia.” He is celebrated as a literary and cultural figure for such poems as “Old Ironsides” (considered responsible for saving the U.S.S. Constitution), for his early forays into what would be considered a new depth psychology, and for terming Boston the “Hub of the solar system” and describing its “Brahmin” caste.

Join us to help celebrate the life, the accomplishments, and the continuing relevance of the literary and scientific contributions of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Spirit of Skepticism:

November 17, 2009, 1:00 PM- 5:00 PM, reception 5:00-6:30

Location: Countway Library, 10 Shattuck St., Boston

You could be an information spigot

Even if you are not an information altruist, there are those who would like to just plug you in and take it from there.

Hat tip: Ken Mandl

Where is the consumer in healthcare?

Prof. Regina Herzlinger, with the Harvard Business School, will be teaching a free intensive seminar course, Innovations in Consumer-Driven Health Care, in January 2010. This is a one week class, beginning on 1/11/10 and ending on 1/15/10.

She welcomes students from the various Harvard and MIT graduate schools as well as both undergraduate universities to submit their resumes to her for consideration if they wish to enroll . These can be to jlopez@hbs.edu. The class itself will be held on the Harvard Business School campus and will likely run from 9.00am until 3.30pm with a lunch period from 11.30am-1.00pm. Students chosen to take part in this class will be notified in November.

Innovations in Consumer-Driven Health Care

Monday, January 11-Friday, January 15; 9-11:30am and 1-3:30pm
Aldrich 211

Career Focus

Health care industry

Educational Objectives

This seminar will focus on the creation of innovations in health care that
better meet consumer needs.

Content and Organization

In the first two sessions on day one, students will examine three different
national models for achieving universal coverage:

*   Consumer-driven health care in Switzerland, in which consumers use their
own funds to purchase insurance
*   Single payer health care in the UK, in which the government controls the
health care system
*   Managed competition system in the Netherlands, in which the government
creates a national health care market

On day two, the second two sessions will delineate the entrepreneurial
opportunities and obstacles created by a consumer-driven health care system.

On days three, four, and five, students will discuss case studies of
entrepreneurial, consumer-driven ventures in the following fields:

*   Health insurance - innovative efforts that support health promotion and
reward efficiency (two cases)
*   Health services - focused, integrated care for chronic diseases; specialty
hospitals; retail health care outlets; medical travel (four cases)
*   Personalized diagnostics tests for mutated genes; companies that offer
genetic maps (two cases)
*   Personalized medical devices - Proteous; Chronicle (two cases)
*   Personalized drugs (one case)
*   Personalized information (one case)

Not so knotty genomes

Erez Lieberman, of the HST Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program has just published a provocative paper which uses moderate resolution mapping (1 megabase) of the 3 dimensional structure of the genome. The results are consistent with prior work suggesting that DNA maintains its function by packaging itself into a structure that is free of knots. Now, if I could only apply this to my collection of wires in my drawer.

Information Technology is Central to the Conduct of Medicine

Medicine always was a discipline of information processing. We took data (signs and symptoms) from the patient, matched them against our knowledge-base (the hopefully updated residue of medical school) and then came up with a interwoven diagnostic and therapeutic plan. We then understood that this information processing could be automated. But then, there were no electronic medical record systems that could truly provide the data that such automation required. Decades later, the federal government is trying to make a concerted push into this arena, one that explicitly includes the patient (us) as an active participant in this information processing enterprise. Yesterday, we wrapped up an interesting meeting attended by representatives of the government, academia, and industry to address some specific opportunities to catalyze successful deployment.

Regulating Curators?

This article suggests that a new bill in introduced in California may regulate how the modern curators and interpreters of biomedical data (bioinformaticians) may end up being regulated and tarred by the same brush as direct-to-consumer genetics testing companies.

“This law doesn’t just cover companies, it covers what’s done in academic institutions, too,” Butte said. “Nothing in this bill blocks that.”

More evidence, in any case, of the centrality of information processing to the biomedical enterprise.