Introducing....the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance

Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC have come together to form the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance. The collaboration will leverage big data to revolutionize healthcare and wellness using the massive amounts of data avaialble from EHRs, imaging, prescriptions, genomic profiles, insurance records and wearable devices, according to an announcement.

The alliance is "a wide-reaching commitment to advance technology and create new data-heavy healthcare innovations over the coming years, resulting in spin-off companies and furthering economic development in the region," according to the announcement.

Funded by UPMC, alliance work carried out by Pitt-led and CMU-led centers, with participation from all three institutions. The centers will work to transform the explosion of health-related data into new technologies, products and services to change the way diseases are prevented and how patients are diagnosed, treated and engaged in their own care.

Reaching the full potential of healthcare data will require close collaboration among the leading health sciences research at Pitt, world-class computer science and machine learning at CMU, and the clinical care, extensive patient data and commercialization expertise at UPMC, according to the announcement.

"The complementary strengths of the alliance's partner institutions will allow us to re-imagine healthcare for millions of people in our shared, data-driven world," said Subra Suresh, president of CMU. "Through this collaboration, we will move more rapidly to immediate prevention and remediation, further accelerate the development of evidence-based medicine, and augment disease-centered models with patient-centered models of care."

The new research centers at CMU and Pitt will be funded over the next six years by UPMC and also will benefit from several hundred million dollars in existing research grants at all three institutions. They promise to create what UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff calls an "innovation ecosystem" for health data in the region.

"We are unlocking the potential of data to tackle some of our nation's biggest challenges: raising the quality and reducing the cost of healthcare. Not only will this effort benefit patients, but it also will accelerate Pittsburgh's revitalization," said Romoff. Corporate partners and entrepreneurs from around the world will want to be close to this healthcare data hub, he predicted, just as Google, Apple and Disney already have space in or near Oakland to be close to CMU's and Pitt's talented faculty and students.  

Initially, the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance will include two research and development centers: the Center for Machine Learning and Health (CMLH), led by founding director Eric Xing, PhD, a CMU professor in the Department of Machine Learning; and the Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data (CCA), spearheaded by Michael Becich, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Pitt. Scientists from all three institutions will participate in the work of each center.

The CMLH will work on challenging problems at the intersections of healthcare and machine learning. Data from sources as varied as EMRs, genomic sequencing, insurance records and wearable sensors will be utilized to directly improve healthcare. The center will focus on five areas: big health care data analytics; personalized medicine and disease modeling; issues of privacy, security and compliance in the context of big data; data-driven patient and provider education and training; and a new general framework for big data in healthcare.

The CCA at the University of Pittsburgh will research and invent new technology for potential use in commercial theranostics and imaging systems for patients and doctors. These technologies will be based on intelligently engineered big data solutions. Some areas of focus for CCA will be: personalized medicine for understanding diseases such as cancer and various lung disorders; genomics and imaging data; and methods for data capture and healthcare analytics. A key goal is new technologies and methods to create actionable information.

UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization arm of UPMC, will lead the efforts to turn these innovative ideas into new, for-profit companies and jobs, building on its nearly 20-year track record of investing in and growing companies that solve healthcare problems.