Director's Note
Dear Colleagues,
2010 will be a transformative year in biomedicine.
Why?
I believe we are starting to see—in a meaningful way—the much-heralded "convergence" of technologies and trends that make for a revolution.
Specifically:
- The national move toward Electronic Health Records—and eventual migration of all health information to a digital format— is gaining momentum
- The rise of online health tools and social networks is changing the way patients and physicians engage within and outside the healthcare setting
- New relationships within the biomedical space are making research more open than ever before
- New technologies are beginning to fuel data exchange from the bench to the bedside and back again, creating a feedback loop to inform care decisions and fuel discoveries.
Together, these trends promise to transform the fundamental way in which we think about information—no longer as an isolated but collective resource. caBIG® is playing a significant role in this transformation to establish "data liquidity," leading to better management of patient experience, better clinical workflows and better ways to aggregate these new information sources for clinical decisions and research. In this open environment, we are building a new model for biomedicine in the 21st century.
In this issue, we provide examples of those who are practicing 21st century medicine. You will read about new research methods and approaches to patient care that would not have been possible without a collaborative spirit so energetic that we can only hope to capture a fraction of it in the technologies we develop and deploy.
Sincerely,
Ken Buetow
Director, NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology
