Dive Brief:
- On Monday, UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) announced the formation of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance.
- The goal of the alliance is to remake healthcare so it is both more computerized and more personalized.
- According to the leaders of the three institutions, millions of gigabytes of accumulated health records could be used to provide more patient-specific methods of predicting and treating health issues than is possible today.
Dive Insight:
UPMC president and CEO Jeffrey Romoff said during a news conference on Monday that the partnership has the potential to unleash "the next generation of healthcare, the next generation of IT and the next generation of Pittsburgh." According to CMU president Subra Suresh, despite several years of collecting health data and insurance records on the majority of Americans, the country has little to show for it. Part of the reason is that the data exists in a multitude of silos, which are controlled by competing companies. He said that sifting through that data "is too much for the capacity of this generation" of scientists and clinicians and that an alliance dedicated to making sense of those numbers could "move society forward."