![\"COM-sharing](\"\/camed\/files\/2017\/06\/ThinkstockPhotos-637808860-636x424.jpg\")
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In an effort to securely share medical data between the U.S. and India, BUSM has received a BU Digital Health Initiative Research Award.<\/p>\n
The $40,000 award will fund the two-year project, \u201cEnabling Data Science for Medicine.\u201d<\/em> It allows for collaboration between BUSM and the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS) and Software & Application Innovation Lab (SAIL).<\/p>\n India has become the Type 2 diabetes capital of the world. The burden of morbidity and mortality is expected to severely tax and overwhelm its health care system over the next 10 to 20 years. It is unknown whether diabetes in obese patients, a common characteristic in the U.S., is the same disease with respect to outcomes as diabetes in lean patients, who are common in India. Analysis of pooled data from U.S. and Indian patients might reveal new mechanism and associations, but the infrastructure for data sharing of clinical, molecular and cellular datasets between India and the U.S. is currently insufficient. Alarmingly, foreign hacking of elections and sensitive databases, including medical data, has become an increasing threat.<\/p>\n However, before sharing medical data can proceed, BUSM researchers and their colleagues must design, develop and test a secure software prototype that establishes a common format for data sharing and allows users to express their preferences for how their data should be shared.<\/p>\n \u201cDomains such as finance, insurance, manufacturing, and transportation have been transformed by the big data revolution. Health care is beginning to be transformed by this revolution as well,\u201d said Mayank Varia, PhD, co-principal investigator of the project and co-director of the BU RISCS Center.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing the talents of RISCS and SAIL, w<\/span>e are developing a secure data-sharing platform using advanced cryptographic tools. We will then be able to compare diabetes and breast cancer patients in Boston and at least two cities in India, Mumbai and Bangalore, where our partners are already building their datasets,\u201d <\/span>explains principal investigator Gerald V. Denis, PhD, associate professor of pharmacology and medicine at BUSM.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project has the ability to change how we address significant problems in global health, creating a model and infrastructure that is scalable to other projects worldwide.\u00a0 To demonstrate this capability, we will not only examine diabetes, inflammation, and breast cancer, but explore these intersections in head and neck cancer as well,\u201d says co-principal investigator Anand K. Devaiah, MD, associate professor of otolaryngology, neurological surgery and ophthalmology.<\/p>\n The researchers strongly believe that the data sharing mechanism developed within this pilot project will lead to the development of a secure IT infrastructure for sharing of healthcare data in the long term.<\/p>\n Other collaborators on this project include co-investigator Ann Marie Egloff, PhD, MPH from BU\u2019s Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine. Software development support will be provided by SAIL, a professional software engineering and consulting lab housed with BU\u2019s Hariri Institute for Computing, and led by Andrei Lapets, PhD.<\/p>\n BU\u2019s Digital Health Initiative is a collaborative effort\u00a0between the\u00a0Institute for Health System Innovation\u00a0and Policy and the Hariri Institute for Computing, two of BU\u2019s university wide research institutes. Digital Health leverages technologies, such as embedded systems, mobile computing, social networking, cloud platforms and methodologies from computing and data sciences to tackle a range\u00a0of applications related to healthcare systems, from medical informatics to healthcare delivery and administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The secure data sharing platform will allow for analysis of information between the U.S. and India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12772,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,143],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12772"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48560"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48563,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48560\/revisions\/48563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bumc.bu.edu\/camed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}