Over the healthcare horizon

Innovation, collaboration focus of 6th annual SAS Healthcare and Life Sciences Executive Conference

By Bill Abbate
SAS Internal Communications

Changes brought about through innovation and collaboration are ushering in a “new dawn” in healthcare, said Kecia Serwin, General Manager of the U.S. Health & Life Sciences business unit, as she welcomed attendees to the 6th Annual SAS Healthcare and Life Sciences Executive Conference.

An Internet-fueled shift to participatory healthcare, a growing focus on preventative medicine and wellness programs, advances in microbiology and genetics, and technology-enabled data exchange are among the factors Serwin cited as driving these changes.

“Healthcare of the future will look vastly different from the healthcare system we know today,” she said.

Making it happen
Delivering the first of the conference’s two keynote presentations, John D. Halamka M.D., Chief Information Officer for the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, summarized the 400 pages of the US federal economic stimulus bill related to healthcare IT (HIT).

During his presentation, “Planning for the Stimulus – Achieving Meaningful Use of Healthcare IT,” Halamka said that the healthcare section of the stimulus package comprises two main parts. One part focuses on accelerating the development of HIT, including establishment of new, more stringent privacy laws. The other part provides incentives for doctors and hospitals that are “meaningful users” of electronic health records.

With a goal of 90 percent of all doctors and 70 percent of all hospitals using electronic health records by 2014, Halamka noted, cloud computing environments and the regional healthcare IT extension centers specified in the stimulus bill must play a major role.

“[Doctors] don’t want to think about technology,” Halamka said. “They want to just care for patients.”
In addition to improving the quality and efficiency of the US healthcare system, the overall economy should benefit from the healthcare provisions in the stimulus bill. Halamka cited estimates of “about 50,000 new jobs to roll out electronic health records in (the United States); 200,000 new jobs when you consider the network effect of how we’re going to need to grow – for example, hardware manufacturers, network manufacturers, software manufacturers, support people, etc.”

Treating diseases in new ways
Within the next few years, the ability to quickly and inexpensively sequence an entire genome of an individual or tumor will “completely revolutionize the way we diagnose disease and the way we manage and treat patients,” said National Cancer Institute Director John E. Niederhuber in his keynote presentation, “21st Century Translational Science.”

According to Niederhuber, genetics and sequencing will be the keys to the medicine of the future because cancer – and disease in general – is a disease of altered genes. Hence, the National Cancer Institute is collaborating with the Human Genome Research Institute on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) pilot project.

The project’s goal is to collect and sequence specimens of a given tumor and compare them with sequences of the patients’ normal tissue to learn about the causative changes in that tumor. Since its inception in 2006, the project has identified three genes highly associated with glioblastoma (brain tumor) that previously had not been linked to that tumor. The project also is studying ovarian cancer and lung cancer tumors.

“The pilot has demonstrated for us that this is the future, that this is how we’re going to characterize individuals and cancer,” Niederhuber said.

Of course the ultimate goal of medical research is to translate findings into more effective patient care methods, and doing so involves management and analysis of huge amounts of data, as well as networked information sharing among multiple stakeholders. Hence, Niederhuber said, investments in technology, collaboration across scientific disciplines and collaboration between the public and private sectors will be vital to success.

Other conference highlights included:

• Health and Life Sciences Global Practice Director Jason Burke moderated an executive panel discussion, “Analytics and the Future of Healthcare,” during which the audience had the opportunity to pose questions directly to Halamka; Ron Fitzmartin, Vice President, Informatics and Knowledge Management, Daiichi Sankyo; and Patrick A. McIntyre, Vice President Healthcare Analytics, UnitedHealth Group.
  
• SAS Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis presented “Thriving in Today's Economy: Not Just Surviving,” during which he showed the audience how the SAS Business Analytics Framework can help organizations meet the challenges facing the healthcare industry today.
  
• Richard J. Pro, Health Plans Principal for the Health and Life Sciences Global Practice, discussed SAS Fraud Framework, Featuring Social Network Analysis.
  
• Attendees participated in industry breakout sessions tailored to life sciences and healthcare.