What’d you do this Halloween?
I attended a talk on the intersection of technology and healthcare by Dr. Erich Huang, who is an assistant professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics and Assistant Dean for Biomedical Informatics. He’s also the new co-director of Duke Forge, a health data science research group.
This was not a conventional Halloween activity by any means, but I felt lucky to be exposed to this impactful research surrounded by views of the Duke forest in fall in Penn Pavilion at IBM-Duke Day.
Erich Huang, M.D., PhD. is the co-director of Duke Forge, our new health data effort.
Dr. Huang began his talk with a statistic: only six out of 53 landmark cancer biology research papers are reproducible. This fact was shocking (and maybe a little bit scary?), considering that these papers serve as the foundation for saving cancer patients’ lives. Dr. Huang said that it’s time to raise standards for cancer research.
What is his proposed solution? Using data provenance, which is essentially a historical record of data and its origins, when dealing with important biomedical data.
He mentioned Duke Data Service (DukeDS), which is an information technology service that features data provenance for scientific workflows. With DukeDS, researchers are able to share data with approved team members across campus or across the world.
Next, Dr. Huang demonstrated the power of data science in healthcare by describing an example patient. Mr. Smith is 63 years old with a history of heart attacks and diabetes. He has been having trouble sleeping and his feet have been red and puffy. Mr. Smith meets the criteria for heart failure and appropriate interventions, such as a heart pump and blood thinners.
A problem that many patients at risk of heart failure face is forgetting to take their blood thinners. Using Pillsy, a company that makes smart pill bottles with automatic tracking, we could record Mr. Smith’s medication taking and record this information on the blockchain, or by storing blocks of information that are linked together so that each block points to an older version of that information. This type of technology might allow for the recalculation of dosage so that Mr. Smith could take the appropriate amount after a missed dose of a blood thinner.
These uses of data science, and specifically blockchain and data provenance, show great opportunity at the intersection of technology and healthcare. Having access to secure and traceable data can lead to research being more reproducible and therefore reliable.
At the end of his presentation, Dr. Huang suggested as much collaboration in 
research between IBM and Duke as possible, especially in his field. Seeing that the Research Triangle Park location of IBM is the largest IBM development site in the world and is conveniently located to one of the best research universities in the nation, his suggestion makes complete sense.
By Nina Cervantes 