Wired News reports on a massive database project from Mayo which has interesting, scary, and rather exciting implications for diagnosis and treatment. Genetic information will eventually be included. Excerpts:
During an office visit, a medic will be able to do enough quick data mining to ensure the most accurate diagnoses and most effective treatments while the patient waits, de Groen said. “Ideally the computer would query both our own database of patients (and) the complete medical literature.” ….
Health-care professionals look forward to the eventual addition of patients’ genetic information to databases like the MCLSS — a field known as clinical genomics — as a major advance in medicine. Among other things, such access would allow doctors to divine with great speed and accuracy what drugs have worked best on a certain type of person with a certain illness. …
“It’s really about applying the knowledge from many to the benefit of one,” said Dr. Anne-Marie Derouault, director of alliances and distribution channel management for IBM Life Sciences, who heads the IBM teams working on the project. “Without genomics, it would be very hard to do that. Putting that kind of information with traditional information is potentially going to bring medicine to another level.”