Three exciting new initiatives

This week in health IT, there were several partnerships announced that aim to advance healthcare. While there is much wrong with the state of healthcare today, these are the kinds of initiatives that signal an exciting future.

Along with the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OSHU), Intel has launched Collaborative Cancer Cloud (CCC), a service designed to enable providers and researchers to securely share genomic, imaging and clinical data among patients.

The collaborative plans, by 2020, to have physicians be able to give a patient a diagnosis and generate a specific treatment plan within 24 hours.

The Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine is collaborating with Helix to develop applications focused on educating consumers about their genetic data and health-related information.

Helix is a joint venture of Illumina, gene-sequencing technology provider, and investment firms Warburg Pincus and Sutter Hill Ventures. Helix will provide consumers access to genetic information by providing affordable genome sequencing and database services. Consumers will be able to send their samples, such as a cheek swab, directly to Helix where it will be sequenced and the genetic information will be stored in Helix’s database. After being sequenced, individuals will be able to manage their data and explore an open marketplace of on-demand applications to gain additional insights into the genomic data that has already been acquired, according to the post. Helix plans to begin decoding DNA in 2016.

Denver is the site of a 300,000-square-foot digital health center, called Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation.

The partnership between a developer and a healthcare entrepreneur hope to make Colorado America’s “digital health capital."

The partnership has acquired a full city block of land in Denver and four companies already plan to be tenants.

Beth Walsh

Clinical Innovation + Technology editor