The Cloud: Coming Soon to Healthcare

January 09, 2013

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With increasing numbers of cloud-based tools and services — Amazon Cloud Player, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more — such storage may soon come to healthcare. Joy Pritts, the chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the US Department of Health and Human Services told a panel that "the switch to cloud is inevitable" for electronic medical records, reports Science Progress.

Such a switch, Science Progress adds, is supposed to save money while also enabling large-scale data analytics. However, Security and privacy remain challenges, like protecting data from hackers or lost devices, it adds. Further, laws governing cloud computing and electronic medical record storage are out of date. "The technology, the movement, and the practices are way ahead of the policy," Pritt added.

My new book the Techno-Human

Submitted by carvalko on Tue, 01/22/2013 - 15:05.

My new book the Techno-Human Shell-A Jump in the Evolutionary Gap, was just released. It should be of interest to those who are looking at the future of medical technology and cloud computing. See, http://www.amazon.com/The-Techno-Human-Shell-Evolutionary-ebook/dp/B00AW...

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Sandra Pankow

Research Associate
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The Cystic Fibrosis Interactome

Sandra Pankow is currently a research associate in John Yates' lab at Scripps Research Institute, studying protein-protein interactions involved in cystic fibrosis.

"I'm interested in trying to understand genetic diseases from a systems biology point of view," she says. "I've found that proteomics is the ideal tool for this because it gives the researcher the possibility to investigate thousands of proteins at the same time rather than just having to guess which one or two you should look at."

During her time in the Yates lab, Pankow has worked on developing a new technique for large-scale profiling of protein-protein interactions called co-purifying protein identification technology, or CoPIT. The method uses co-purification of proteins followed by mass spectrometry analysis and bioinformatic processing to identify not just primary protein-protein interactions, but second-degree and third-degree interactors as well.

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