Healthcare: Is cost control possible? (reBlog from Aurametrix)

I found this fascinating quote today:

How many medical tests do you need to sleep sound at night knowing that you are healthy enough? Billions, trillions, googols?How many out of a few thousand existing medical tests are redundant or irrelevant to individual consumers? Mamograms and colonoscopies are perfect examples of overused diagnostic procedures. (see also the consumerreports article on overused tests and treatments).Aurametrix, Aurametrix: Healthcare: Is cost control possible?, Nov 2009

You should read the whole article.

Moving To The Clouds

Internet-based services allow to add computer power, store data, reduce long computation time and cope with large memory requirements. They also allow to use browser-based applications and develop Web applications without purchasing new hardware or software.

Recent $1.5 million award from the NIH to the Pervasive Technology Institute Digital Science Center at Indiana University will explore the potential of cloud computing to support life science research.

One of the potential uses will be analyzing next-generation sequencing data expected to generate "one to two orders of magnitude larger" more data than can be handled with current computational capabilities.

The project will involve commercial cloud computing infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other open source software.

"Cloud computing approaches are likely to change the nature of our national research computing infrastructure in the coming years," principal investigator Geoffrey Fox, director of the Digital Science Center and associate dean of research and graduate studies in the IU School of Informatics and Computing, said in a statement.