SCIENCE
Institute for Advanced Health Announces High Performance Secure “National Health Intranet”
The Chan Soon-Shiong
Institute for Advanced Health (CSS Institute) announced that it has achieved a
major milestone in its establishment of a secure “medical information
superhighway” as first envisioned by founder Patrick Soon-Shiong, M.D. and
outlined to the Institute of Medicine in July 2009. The CSS Institute has
assumed financial responsibility for the nation’s premier advanced research
communications network – National LambdaRail. NLR consists of over 12,000 miles
of high performance optical fiber from coast to coast, capable of speeds of up
to 100 gigabits per second. In partnership with Cisco Systems and their
technology platform, NLR provides universities and government agencies with
massive data transmission services required by leading-edge research.
The CSS Institute intends
to put the virtually unlimited capacity of NLR at the disposal of genomic and
proteomic researchers, connecting them with each other, with supercomputing
capabilities and ultimately with health care providers. NLR will continue to
serve all other big science projects, as it does now, for example connecting
the US institutions working with the Large Hadron Collider built by the
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switz., and also
the laboratories of federal agencies such as NASA and NIH. The CSS Institute’s
financial commitment, which is estimated to amount to more than $100 million,
is enabling NLR to embark immediately on substantial upgrades to its entire
network. The special focus on health will be served by new connections with
genome sequencing centers around the
“The CSS-NLR partnership
will be truly transformative,” said Dr. Soon-Shiong, who has become Chairman
and CEO of NLR. “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
healthcare. 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 healthcare.”
Harvey Fineberg, M.D.,
President of the
Denis Cortese, M.D.,
President of the Arizona-based Healthcare Transformation Institute and former
CEO of the Mayo Clinic, also welcomed the news. “Our healthcare system has long
suffered from the fact that there is very poor connection between medical
science and the delivery of healthcare,” he said. “This development is a giant
leap towards bridging that divide. It will allow us to apply the power of
supercomputing to the point of care, and this will be revolutionary.”
The development was also
applauded by James Weinstein, M.D., President of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Clinic, and Director of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical
Practice, which for more than 20 years has documented variations in healthcare
around the
Dr. Soon-Shiong said that
the CSS Institute would soon announce its first use case for the new national
health information infrastructure afforded by NLR and the other connectivity
provided by the Institute.