All of Us program wants to change the face of medicine; University of Pittsburgh: University Times, January 8, 2019

Susan Jones, University of Pittsburgh: University Times; All of Us program wants to change the face of medicine

"Dr. Steven Reis wants all of you to become part of All of Us.

Pitt received a $46 million award in 2016 from National Institutes of Health to build the partnerships and infrastructure needed to carry out the All of Us initiative, which seeks to gather health information from 1 million people nationwide to create a database to study different diseases and other maladies, and in the process change the face of medicine.

In Pennsylvania, Pitt is responsible for recruiting 120,000 participants and by early this week had reached 11,610. Nationally, there are more than a dozen other organizations now gathering participants and more than 80,000 people have enrolled nationwide. There are between 40 and 50 people working on the project at Pitt...

The institute “supports translational research, meaning how to get research from the bench to the bedside, to the patient, to practice, to the community, to health policy,” Reis said...

The information will be stored in a secure central database created by Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Verily Life Sciences (a Google company) and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. Volunteers will have access to their study results, along with summarized data from across the program."

Pitt, CMU and UPMC hope to remake health care via new big data alliance; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/16/15

Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Pitt, CMU and UPMC hope to remake health care via new big data alliance:

"Pittsburgh is making a big bet on big data.

UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University on Monday announced the formation of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance to “revolutionize health care and wellness” by using data to detect potential outbreaks as well as create health care innovations that will spawn spinoff companies...

The universities and UPMC acknowledged that security of personal health information is a paramount concern. For research purposes, clinical data is usually scrubbed of personal identifiers, but when devices are gathering and sending data from smartphones and other wearable technologies, the potential for a breach is heightened."