Last weekend, Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, FACMI, Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School received the 2020 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence at the AMIA 2020 Virtual Annual Symposium. This award – the highest honor in informatics – is bestowed to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to medical informatics has made a lasting impression on the field.
Throughout his career, Dr. Kohane has worked to extract meaning out of large sets of clinical and genomic data to improve health care. His efforts mining medical data have contributed to the identification of harmful side-effects associated with drug therapy, recognition of early warning signs of domestic abuse, and detection of variations and patterns among people with conditions such as autism.
As the lead investigator of the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside) project, a National Institutes of Health-funded National Center for Biomedical Computing initiative, Dr. Kohane’s work has led to the creation of a comprehensive software and methodological framework to enable clinical researchers to accelerate the translation of genomic and “traditional” clinical findings into novel diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutics.
Dr. Kohane is a visionary with a motto: Make Our Data Work for Us! Please join me in congratulating Dr. Kohane, recipient of the 2020 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence.
Hear more from Dr. Kohane in this video.
Video transcript (below)
The vision that has driven my research agenda is that we were not doing our patients any favors by not embracing information technology to accelerate our ability to both discover new findings in medicine, and to improve the way we deliver the medicine.
What does “make our data work for us” mean? It means that let’s not just use it for the real reason most of it is accumulated at present, which is in order to satisfy administrative or reimbursement processes. Let’s use it to improve health care.
Using just our claims data, we can actually predict – better than genetic tests – recurrence rates for autism. It’s the ability to show, with these same data, that drugs used for preventing immature birth in the genetic form are just as effective as those that are brand name; 40 times as expensive. It’s, as we’ve seen most recently, the ability to pull together data around pandemics within weeks, if and only if, we understand the data that’s spun off our health care systems in the course of care.
And finally, as exemplified by work on FHIR, which was funded by the Office of the National Coordinator and then the National Library Medicine, the ability to flow the data directly to the patient to finally allow patients’ access to their data in a computable format to allow decision support for the patient without going through the long loop of the health care system.
Because the NIH and NLM have invested in working on real-world sized experiments in biomedical informatics, on supporting the education of the individuals who drive those projects, and in supporting the public standards that are necessary for these projects to work and to scale, they’ve established an ecosystem that now is able to deliver true value to decision makers, to clinicians, and now to patients, as we’re seeing with a SMART on FHIR implementation on smartphones.
So, for those of you — the biomedical informaticians of the future who are clinicians — I strongly recommend that you don’t wait for someone else to fix the system. You have the most powerful tools to affect medicine, information processing tools. So, don’t wait to get old. Don’t wait to be recognized. You have the tools. Get in there, help change medicine. We all depend on you!