LEVERAGING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY FOR COLLABORATION IN CLINICAL TRIALS - Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research - page 286

The key issues in the health care industry include:
• Health care providers heavily rely on their personal experience and
opinion as the main reference of diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis.
• The information or knowledge gained by the health care providers
through years of practice and experience is not shared among the health
care professionals who can benefi t from it for more accurate diagnosis
or for better treatment for higher effi cacy (e.g., a survey conducted by
the American Medical Association suggested that physicians in the
United States would rather share their toothbrushes than share their
patient information [4] ).
• The health care services are rather fragmented with lack of continuum
of services from diagnosis and treatment through prognosis and from
primary care to tertiary care.
• The healthcare services are provided reactively as episodic events.
• All the patients are treated equally for diagnosis and prognosis with little
consideration of their genotypic or phenotypic variances.
• Consequently patient safety is signifi cantly compromised.
Translational research can be enabled by an integrated IT solution that enables
interdisciplinary collaboration across multiple institutions, provides transpar-
ent access to multidimensional data and tools to analyze unstructured data as
well as structured data, manages vast amount of multidimensional data, pro-
vides high-performance computing, and incorporates robotic instruments as
part of the workfl ow management. This integrated IT solution refers to a set
of integrated systems that draws upon relevant information and context to
enhance the activity and performance of people, robotic instruments, systems,
and organizations through an online collaboration across the boundaries of
various disciplines, organizations, countries, and geographical locations.
The goal of the IT solution is to assist, while leveraging IT and related tech-
nologies, a group of multidisciplinary researchers in navigating the information
spaces in “ real ” and “ virtual ” environments, orienting and guiding them based
on the research themes, interacting with and leveraging others to fi nd their way
in the information spaces, and sharing discoveries and knowledge among them.
The main focus is to foster trust and community in research teams, whether
colocated or geographically distributed, and to support long-running, contex-
tual interactions rather than short-term, task-focused activities, for a holistic
management of collaboration among a group of multidisciplinary researchers.
The key characteristics of the IT solution to enable interdisciplinary col-
laboration across multiple institutions are as follows:
1. The data to be analyzed are mainly unstructured, vast, and yet scarce
and noisy.
2. The users of the system, also referred to as “actors,” include autonomous
robotic systems as well as human users.