Revolutionary Technology Enables Collaboration
Building an application to help unite one million women with researchers is no small feat. By all accounts it's rather BIG— caBIG®, in fact. Technology previously developed by the caBIG® community will play a pivotal role in this endeavor.
Many of the core software modules that will be leveraged in this new collaboration have been repurposed from an application known as caMatch, which was developed several years ago to "match" clinical researchers with individuals interested in participating in breast cancer clinical trials. Months of work with the Love/Avon Army of Women staff led to a significant expansion of the personal health record capability of the original caMatch application and the addition of new modules and questions tuned specifically to women's health issues.
Creating an application that follows the caBIG® application architecture and is enabled by common, open source middleware is just the beginning. Since this initiative involves such a large population of women, the new web application must have the capability to allow thousands of users to access, edit, and review their personal oncology and health histories—simultaneously. By continually testing the software, engineers can help ensure that the "army of women" can access the site.
Although the current application supports the needs of the breast cancer community, the "under the hood" capabilities extend well beyond cancer. By constructing appropriate disease-specific questions and developing an easy to modify web-based interface, researchers in other disease areas can also be linked to consumers.
This effort has been realized through a critical commercial partnership with HealthCare IT, Inc.—a Maryland-based company that provides professional services to the biomedical research, clinical research, and healthcare sector. Healthcare IT, Inc. has provided the software engineering, large scale testing, and IT infrastructure to support the collaboration.
