• Data Repositories for Research
• Participant Recruitment Tools and Strategies
• Clinical Information Systems and Research Study Management Systems
• Research Portal Innovations

Some highlights include

• i2b2 as a data repository (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside)
• REDCap for research study management (Research Electronic Data Capture) – used in over 160 centers
• Vivo – enabling scientific collaboration – an impressive development using semantic technology.

The scope of these technologies are impressive and on the cusp of enabling great strides in medical research. Through the NIH and CTSA grant process, this parallel development to the Health 2.0 startup process is ongoing. When will these academic tools converge with the Health 2.0 and social media explosion to transform medicine together?

So could this data explorer be used more broadly with other health data sets. For starters, those at Data.gov (although most of the health data sets are Medicare cost data). But could major disease registries open themselves up to this API so that medical researchers could visualize more data sources and generate more research questions more quickly.  This could be one solution for the for the lethal lag time.  The CDC has additional data sets available. But what about opening closed data sets, such as, those from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons or other disease-specific registries. Then there is the growing volume of patient reported data from sites like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether.

The limitation of this approach is having researchers capable of interpreting these data visualizations to make meaningful interpretations. The peer review process would prevent publication of misinterpretations of the data. An additional control would be combining the data explorer with social networking tools for users to discuss visualizations and research observations of the data.  Perhaps this could be accomplished through Google Wave.

Comments and data sets welcome.

A related initiative is Open eHealth described as “Open Source for Electronic Health – Open eHealth Foundation to Provide Solid Basis for Interoperability.” This group appears to be more focused on interoperability including SOA and has some important partners include Sun Microsystems. They note that, “The healthcare oriented components will initially include services for patient consent management, virtual patient records, patient information management and services for a standardized users, roles and relations management.” This is obviously in its early stages which may mean it is advantageous to join.

Open source has strong possibilities in health care if it can gain the trust of major players over proprietary systems. It will be important to see how IBM with its open source emphasis will work in this space.