Last week I attended the Forum on Healthcare Innovation, held in Hartford, Connecticut. Conference organizers The Jackson Laboratory, University of Connecticut and Yale University are to be commended – this was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. The content was fascinating, and the event was very well-organized. The conference follows the October 7th grand opening of The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine (Jackson Labs) in Farmington, Connecticut. We are fortunate to have this world-class facility in our state. I expect Jackson Labs will foster a whole new class of start-ups and healthcare innovators.
One of the most riveting sessions I attended last week was the keynote address by Dr. Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph. D. Dr. Hood is president of the Institute for Systems Biology and the champion of P4Medicine, P4Mi for short. According to Dr. Hood, P4Mi is the “convergence of systems medicine, big data and patient activated social networks.” It’s the collaboration of these separate entities and the integration of their systems that P4Mi believes will create a new healthcare system that delivers better clinical care at a lower cost. P4Mi is undertaking a decades-long study on tens of thousands of people to build its data base and “identify actionable possibilities” that allow people and their healthcare providers to move from disease-based care to wellness-based care.
An ambitious undertaking that may pay dividends for all of us. I’m excited about the possibilities and have volunteered to be part of the study.
An image from the P4Mi web site depicts the convergence of systems medicine, big data and patient activated social networks. P4Mi is undertaking a pilot project to build a data base of over 100,000 healthy people and, over the next 20 – 30 years, mine insights that support a transformative approach to healthcare that is “predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory.”