NETWORKS
With $100 million for high-speed data network, Phoenix-based Institute for Advanced Health gains prominence
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The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Advanced Health, which announced in June that it would establish its headquarters in downtown
In June, the City of
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With the announcement of the CSS Institute's role in managing National LambdaRail (NLR), which enables the secure transmission of data at up to 100 gigabits per second, it appears that the supercomputer at the airport facility will function as a sort of nerve center for NLR's new concentration on health data. In a news release, the CSS Institute described the evolving NLR as a "national health intranet."
NLR, which was established as a nonprofit organization to connect hundreds of universities and federal laboratories, is already used for enormous biomedical-research and health-care projects. These endeavors, such as the analysis by the
"The CSS-NLR partnership will be truly transformative," said Dr. Soon-Shiong, who now serves as the chairman and CEO of NLR, as well as the president and CEO of the CSS Institute. "NLR's national network infrastructure will allow us to connect with virtually all of the nation's key academic and research institutions, and thereby accelerate the translation of new science into therapy and better health care. It will serve as a cornerstone of our long-held vision to establish a secure national intranet of health, and a digital infrastructure for continuous improvement in health and health care."
In March, when Dr. Soon-Shiong spoke at the annual conference of CTIA Wireless, a telecommunications trade group, he described the need for such an infrastructure, and presented a vision under which it would allow a vast range of information to flow between researchers, care providers, patients, and even payors.
"What is of great concern is that from the time a breakthrough is made to the time it reaches a patient takes 17 years," Dr. Soon-Shiong said in his address, describing current health-research practices. Furthermore, he said, "if the idea is to provide health, unfortunately there is no reimbursement for providing health; there's more reimbursement for providing procedures."
That untenable system could be overturned by leveraging developments in high-performance computing, mobile technology, and high-speed data connectivity, he continued. Enough health information is already generated to shorten the time it takes to develop new diagnostics, medical devices, and therapies, and that information holds the potential to reshape reimbursement practices as well. In both cases, Dr. Soon-Shiong said, the difficulty lies in synthesizing and interpreting the available data.
"Within the health-care system, there's a legacy of thousands of software applications that don't speak to one another," he told the CTIA audience. "You need a meta-data system--a federated meta-data system--so that you can capture this data in a consolidated way, which then says you need a cloud, one that is HIPAA compliant, and also global."
However, he warned, capturing the data from disparate systems is only the first step. "Knowledge isn't the same as data. We have the opportunity to create wisdom databases as opposed to knowledge databases."
The complexity of analysis that will be performed by the CSS Institute's supercomputer in Phoenix, using data transmitted via NLR, may be virtually unprecedented; long term, the impact on health could be profound.
"By enhancing the infrastructure of the National LambdaRail," said Harvey Fineberg, president of the
The immediate impact for
"This is a great project," said
The Business Journal reported that the $200 million the CSS Institute intends to invest in