Becker's Hospital Review

63 INNOVATION Amazon, Oracle join tech and healthcare leaders to create toolkit to optimize wearables data By Naomi Diaz T he Digital Medicine Society collaborated with global healthcare, research and digital health innovation organizations to create four toolkits aimed at helping data producers, processors, and consumers use data from wearables and digital sensing products. e kits, dubbed the Sensor Data Integrations Toolkits, were created in partnership with healthcare leaders from Amazon Web Services, Oracle, Tampa, Fla.-based Moffitt Cancer Center, Takeda and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, according to a July 18 press release. e aim of the toolkits is to help drive better and faster decisions to improve healthcare delivery and research using sensor-generated data. "Timelines are getting quicker while the data collected is increasing exponentially — there is a clear and significant need for how to effectively and securely collect and use this information at scale," said Lita Sands, head of solutions life sciences at Amazon Web Services. "DiMe's new toolkits are a lifeline to organizations working with sensor data. ey offer a comprehensive starting point for data producers, processors and consumers to help build an integrated pipeline to support better and faster decision making." e Digital Medicine Society is a global non-profit where members of the digital medicine community come together to answer digital medicine's challenges, develop clinical-quality resources on a technology timeline and deliver resources via open-source channels and educational programs. n Startup says $100 genome could be on the way By Giles Bruce U ltima Genomics, a startup that has raised more than $600 million, said it plans to release a $100 genome, a step that could revolutionize disease diagnosis and precision medicine. The company presented the first scientific results of its platform at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference in early June. The early research has involved scientists from institutions such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Stanford Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine and Baylor College of Medicine. "DNA is nature's storage media and the instruction set for every living organism, yet with current technologies, we can't access that information at the scale needed to truly understand complex biology," Gilad Almogy, Ultima Genomics' founder and CEO, said in a May 31 news release. "Our architecture is intended for radical scaling, and the $100 genome is merely the first example of what it can deliver. We are committed to continuously drive down the cost of genomic information until it is routinely used in every part of the healthcare system." The move represents another potential evolution in the expanding field of genomics. In 2006, for example, Science magazine reported on the possibility of a $1,000 genome. Ultimata Genomics' funding sources include General Atlantic, Andreessen Horowitz and D1 Capital. The startup recently partnered with both Google DeepVariant and Nvidia to leverage their deep learning and artificial intelligence tools for the $100 genome project. n Quantum computing is coming to healthcare By Giles Bruce Q uantum computing, a futuristic concept that many of its proponents don't even fully understand, could be used to develop new medical treatments and protect personal health information. The Chicago Quantum Exchange, an initiative that includes University of Chicago and Northwestern University, is getting started with $700 million for research that could lead to breakthroughs in medicine, the Chicago Tribune reported June 18. The still-in-development computers could perform complex tasks outside the realm of modern computers, such as folding proteins, which could help develop drugs for hard-to-treat diseases such as Alzheimer's, according to the article. The technology will allow researchers to "push the boundaries of what is currently possible," University of Chicago professor David Awschalom, director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, told the newspaper. Meanwhile, health systems are preparing for the possibility that quantum computers could later decrypt patient data that is stolen nowadays. Kristin Myers, CIO of New York city-based Mount Sinai Health System, said this quantum threat could come within the next three to five years, so her organization hired Google spinoff Sandbox AQ to make its encryption systems quantum safe, CIO reported June 14. "It sounds like a long time to start looking at this, but it's really not," she told the website. "If we start this work now, it puts us in a better position of addressing this vulnerability before it's exploitable." n

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