The Ohio State University develops revolutionary cloud-based TRIAD platform
30 August 2011 17:56:57
While the healthcare industry was slow at first to adopt cloud computing practices, organizations are now beginning to use public and private cloud services for certain purposes. Many departments are experiencing great success, while developing their own innovative applications for the new technology.
The Ohio State University recently released a statement explaining how its Medical Center created a new system, which it refers to as the Translational Research Informatics and Data management grid, that is expected to transform medical research and storage processes.
According to the university, the biomedical informatics scientists who created the new cloud-inspired technology, developed the grid to run on the cloud, and expect the TRIAD system to accelerate research pertaining to rare cancers and arthritis.
"With the current technology, a researcher might dedicate more than 100 hours to connect the dots between a set of tissue samples, the individual medical histories for the patients who provided those tissues and then analyzing the group as a whole," OSU biomedical informatics department chair Philip Payne said in the statement. "With the TRIAD platform, researchers can now execute this type of search and analysis in minutes."
The university says that the new system aims to fix a fundamental problem with the cloud in regard to the medical research industry.
"When it comes to biomedical research, you have the digital equivalent to the Tower of Babel," Payne added. " … TRIAD acts like the ultimate interpreter between all the different 'languages' that biomedical data comes in so that researchers spend time figuring out how the information could improve the way we treat a disease rather than spend time finding and translating various data sets."
Healthcare IT recently published an article listing that 30 percent of all healthcare organizations in the U.S. are either currently using or in the process of transitioning to cloud platform, infrastructure, data storage or software services. As more begin to become comfortable with the services, the efficacy of TRIAD, along with other systems, will continue to improve, thus strengthening the results of biomedical informatics.
Payne, along with other creators of the revolutionary system, expects the TRIAD platform to reach all around the world. According to the university, new funding will go directly toward developing services to increase the amount of medical research facilities that choose to adopt the technology, as some do not have the resources to implement the platform.
The website notes just under twenty medical research facilities are currently using the TRIAD platform, including multiple Clinical and Translational Science Awards and National Institutes of Health funded institutions.
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