Lee Pierce, BS, MIS, is the Healthcare Chief Data Officer for Sirius. Lee was the chief data officer at Intermountain Healthcare for 5 years, and was involved leading and building data and analytics capabilities at Intermountain for over 20 years. He has been accountable for the development of Intermountain’s data and analytics strategy, infrastructure, data governance efforts, business intelligence development, and coordination of analytics and data science services throughout the Intermountain enterprise. Lee has over 22 years of experience in healthcare IT, specializing in organizing enterprise efforts to leverage data as an enterprise asset to by developing data and analytics strategy and competencies. Read his full bio.

Interview with Lee Pierce of Sirius Computer Solutions

Q: What is the state of big data and analytics in healthcare, and how to best use the reams of data available?

A: More than ever, Healthcare organizations are achieving measurable value through use of their data and analytics assets. There is more raw material available than ever to create value. This raw material is the data flowing from internal systems and applications and also from devices and systems external to healthcare organizations. The high-level steps required to turn that raw material into insight and action have remained consistent for a long time. Unfortunately, so have the challenges remained consistent. But progress is being made across healthcare to achieve real, measurable value with data and analytics.

The challenges to achieve the value desired from data assets and analytics span all areas of technology, people and processes. When it comes to technology, it’s certainly not a lack of choices and vendors trying to help, but this causes more confusion to most healthcare organizations rather than contributing value in a system wide, coordinated way. Many organizations look to their EMR vendor to provide the technologies needed to organize and analyze data. This is an important step and is certainly part of an ecosystem of tools and technologies needed to achieve value. But to even discuss the technologies needed, there must be a strategy for providing capabilities for each category of data users, from basic consumers to the most advanced producers of analytic solutions. This requires a set of capabilities, leveraging a combination of tools and technologies, typically not just from one technology vendor.

There are also significant people and process challenges in healthcare that must be addressed to achieve value. There is no “easy button” to organize, analyze and implement insights in healthcare, especially without having an understanding of the people and processes required to achieve value. It requires a holistic approach of people, process and technology. It requires business and clinical leaders who are committed to managing their part of healthcare business with data and analytics insights, committed to take insights and use them to change the decisions and processes they manage. This requires data literacy, governance, and a commitment that is lacking in many healthcare organizations today. But even with the challenges that exist, there is a well-established path to healthcare value from data/analytics and hope for healthcare organizations to make significant advancements with their data/analytics capabilities.

Q: What are the benefits of using big data and analytics for patients?

A: The benefits to healthcare organizations to develop data and analytics solutions and capabilities are significant. Patients, people, individuals are the ultimate benefactor of data/analytics being done right. At an individual level, this is allowing people to live as healthy as possible, as they understand their role in preventing disease, helping them make better daily health decisions. At a provider and health system level, data and analytics value is available across all business and clinical areas. In clinical use cases, this is measured at a high level by having the best clinical care being provided at the lowest overall cost possible. When understood and applied correctly to clinical practice, these insights benefit individual patients one by one as they are implemented, and better care is provided at an individual level. In operational areas of healthcare, analytics are contributing to significant financial and operational savings. Even these savings to the healthcare system should translate to lower costs for individual patients.

Q: What are the barriers to healthcare organizations achieving the value and vision of personalized analytics?

A: Personalized analytics requires an analytics maturity level that most healthcare organizations have not yet achieved. Most healthcare organizations are still working through the decisions and processes for achieving basic to moderate analytic competencies, to provide macro level analytic insights and value at a departmental and system level, with a hope that personalized analytics will come soon after. Personalized analytics also requires a data profile at an individual level that is only partially available today. Healthcare systems need more data at an individual person level, that is not available in an EMR system, that is only available when a holistic strategy and view of analytics and data assets is taken. Some of this is due to our continued lack of data standards in healthcare, even with the many efforts over many decades to define and implement these standards. Yet there still is hope and progress being made, but we must make it easier than it is today.

Q: What are the challenges of incorporating genomic data into the healthcare system?

A: There are technology and process challenges with incorporating genomic data into healthcare systems. On the technology side, there is data storage and sheer computational power limitations that can be overcome, but most organizations do not have at their disposal today. The ability to then integrate this genomic data and insights with other data assets then becomes an additional step required, and is a challenge most healthcare organizations are facing today. On the process side, most healthcare organizations are not ready to use genomic data and incorporate that data into their clinical practice, even if it was stored and analyzed and insights available for use. Of course, there are exceptions to this and genomic data is being used at organizations like Intermountain Healthcare for oncology use cases, but there is so much more to be achieved. We need to address the basic blocking and tackling of data challenges described above first, then we can better incorporate genomic data as an additional data source for achieving the next level of healthcare value from data and analytics.

Interview with Gabriel Bien-Willner of Palmetto GBA

Q: What does your role entail as the director of the MolDX program at Palmetto GBA?

A: The job directing MolDX is multifaceted; first and foremost the MolDX program is responsible for assessing molecular diagnostic tests on the market and makes coverage and pricing determinations for such tests and technology. This is usually done through local coverage determination policies or technical assessments.

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Interview with Peter Marks of FDA

Q: The CBER’s Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation program has been very successful, with about 100 requests for designation in the two years of its existence. Can you please tell us about the program and how it was put together?

A: The Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) Designation program came into being as part of the 21st Century Cures Act that was signed into law on December 13, 2016.

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Interview with Calum MacRae of Harvard Medical School

Q: What patient data do we need to better understand the underlying cause of disease and how to prevent it?

A: Medicine at present is highly underdetermined and data poor. To be precise, one must be comprehensive, so medicine (with our consent) will use not only what we currently conceive of as biomedical information, but also data from across our lives.

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Headlines from PMWC 2019 Silicon Valley

A big ‘Thank You’ to all of our presenters and attendees for celebrating 10 years of precision medicine progress with us! PMWC 2019 Silicon Valley was attended by 2000 participants from 35 countries, which included over 400 speakers in 5 parallel tracks!

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Interview with Ken Bloom of Ambry Genetics

Q: Tell us more about your organization/company. What patient population are you serving and which services are you specializing in?

A: Ambry Genetics is a recognized leader in high quality complex genetic testing. We seek to find the genomic cause or contributors to rare diseases, abnormal phenotypes and hereditary disorders.

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Interview with Lee Pierce of Sirius Computer Solutions

Q: What is the state of big data and analytics in healthcare, and how to best use the reams of data available?

A: More than ever, Healthcare organizations are achieving measurable value through use of their data and analytics assets. There is more raw material available than ever to create value. This raw material is the data flowing from internal systems and applications and also from devices and systems external to healthcare organizations.

Read More

Interview with Anita Nelsen of PAREXEL

Q: There are various new, emerging technologies that bring us closer towards a cure for life-threatening disorders such as cancer, HIV, or Huntington’s disease. Prominent examples include the popular gene editing tool CRISPR or new and improved cell and gene therapies. By when can we expect these new technologies being part of routine clinical care?

A: Today’s emerging technologies are making the promise of individualized treatment a reality.

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Interview with Ilan Kirsch of Adaptive Biotechnologies

Q: The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded recently to James Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options. The Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.” What is your first-hand experience the impact that those new drugs had on patients?

A: For decades cancer was viewed as solely a cell-autonomous condition.

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BMS buys Celgene | Lilly buys Loxo Oncology – Does this Signal a Return to Strong Deal-Making Activities in 2019?

Bristol-Myers Squibb’s blockbuster $74B deal to buy Celgene creates an oncology powerhouse amid industrywide excitement about the rapidly evolving science and explosive growth of the sector. The agreement could signal a return to deal-making for the pharmaceutical industry in the $133B global oncology therapeutics market.

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Interview with Gini Deshpande of NuMedii

Q: What need is NuMedii addressing?

A: NuMedii, has been pioneering the use of Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI) and systems biology since 2010 to accelerate the discovery of precision therapies to address high unmet medical needs. Artificial Intelligence approaches are a natural fit to harness Big Data as they provide a framework to ‘train’ computers to recognize patterns and sift through vast amounts of new and existing genomic

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Interview with Minnie Sarwal of UCSF

Q: Genomic medicine is entering more hospitals and bringing with it non-invasive technology that can be used to better target and treat diseases. What are some key milestones that contributed to this trend?

A: Completion of complete sequence data from the human genome project, and the advances in proteomic, microRNA and epigenetic assays added a layer of pathway biology to the understanding of human diseases.

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Interview with Shidong Jia of Predicine

Q: Once sequencing has been validated as a clinical solution via trusted workflows, and coinciding with the technological developments driving costs lower, we can expect accelerated human genome profiling for clinical Dx. How soon, do you think, will we see accelerated growth and what can we expect?

A: We will see accelerated human genome profiling for clinical Dx in 2019 and the coming years as more biomarker-based cancer drugs are gaining approval.

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Interview with Iya Khalil of GNS Healthcare

Q: Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have sent vast waves across healthcare, even fueling an active discussion of whether AI doctors will eventually replace human physicians in the future. Do you believe that human physicians will be replaced by machines in the foreseeable future? What are your thoughts?

A: I think that there’s a lot of speculation and uncertainty around AI, but I don’t foresee a time when we won’t need physicians.

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Interview with Ilya Michael Rachman of Immix Biopharma Inc.

Q: The Nobel Price in Medicine was awarded recently to James Allison and Tasuku for their work on unleashing the body’s immune system to attack cancer, a breakthrough that has led to an entirely new class of drugs and brought lasting remissions to many patients who had run out of options. The Nobel committee hailed their accomplishments as establishing “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.” Besides CAR T-cell therapy what do you think next generation immunotherapies will look like to successfully combat cancer?

A: The next generation of immunotherapies will build on the insights discovered by immunologists like James Allison and Tasuku Honjo and extend them to modify the body’s response to tumors.

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Join me to Kick off PMWC Silicon Valley in the Santa Clara Convention Center, Focusing on Every Element of Precision Medicine

My team worked in collaboration with Bill Dalton, Kim Blackwell, Atul Butte / India Hook Barnard, Nancy Davidson and Sharon Terry to create a program that touches every component of precision medicine while bringing together all of its key stakeholders. Leading participating institutions including Stanford Health Care, UCSF, Duke Health, Duke University, John Hopkins University, University of Michigan and more will share their learnings and experiences and their successes and challenges, as they make precision medicine the new standard of care for all.

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Johns Hopkins
University Of Michigan

The Precision Medicine World Conference (PMWC), in its 17th installment, will take place in the Santa Clara Convention Center (Silicon Valley) on January 21-24, 2020. The program will traverse innovative technologies, thriving initiatives, and clinical case studies that enable the translation of precision medicine into direct improvements in health care. Conference attendees will have an opportunity to learn first-hand about the latest developments and advancements in precision medicine and cutting-edge new strategies and solutions that are changing how patients are treated.

See 2019 Agenda highlights:

  • Five tracks will showcase sessions on the latest advancements in precision medicine which include, but are not limited to:
    • AI & Data Science Showcase
    • Clinical & Research Tools Showcase
    • Clinical Dx Showcase
    • Creating Clinical Value with Liquid Biopsy ctDNA, etc.
    • Digital Health/Health and Wellness
    • Digital Phenotyping
    • Diversity in Precision Medicine
    • Drug Development (PPPs)
    • Early Days of Life Sequencing
    • Emerging Technologies in PM
    • Emerging Therapeutic Showcase
    • FDA Efforts to Accelerate PM
    • Gene Editing
    • Genomic Profiling Showcase
    • Immunotherapy Sessions & Showcase
    • Implementation into Health Care Delivery
    • Large Scale Bio-data Resources to Support Drug Development (PPPs)
    • Microbial Profiling Showcase
    • Microbiome
    • Neoantigens
    • Next-Gen. Workforce of PM
    • Non-Clinical Services Showcase
    • Pharmacogenomics
    • Point-of Care Dx Platform
    • Precision Public Health
    • Rare Disease Diagnosis
    • Resilience
    • Robust Clinical Decision Support Tools
    • Wellness and Aging Showcase

See 2019 Agenda highlights:

    • Five tracks will showcase sessions on the latest advancements in precision medicine which include, but are not limited to:
      • AI & Data Science Showcase
      • Clinical & Research Tools Showcase
      • Clinical Dx Showcase
      • Creating Clinical Value with Liquid Biopsy ctDNA, etc.
      • Digital Health/Health and Wellness
      • Digital Phenotyping
      • Diversity in Precision Medicine
      • Drug Development (PPPs)
      • Early Days of Life Sequencing
      • Emerging Technologies in PM
      • Emerging Therapeutic Showcase
      • FDA Efforts to Accelerate PM
      • Gene Editing / CRISPR
      • Genomic Profiling Showcase
      • Immunotherapy Sessions & Showcase
      • Implementation into Health Care Delivery
      • Large Scale Bio-data Resources to Support Drug Development (PPPs)
      • Microbial Profiling Showcase
      • Microbiome
      • Neoantigens
      • Next-Gen. Workforce of PM
      • Non-Clinical Services Showcase
      • Pharmacogenomics
      • Point-of Care Dx Platform
      • Precision Public Health
      • Rare Disease Diagnosis
      • Resilience
      • Robust Clinical Decision Support Tools
      • Wellness and Aging Showcase
  • Luminary and Pioneer Awards, honoring individuals who contributed, and continue to contribute, to the field of Precision Medicine
  • 2000+ multidisciplinary attendees, from across the entire spectrum of healthcare, representing different types of companies, technologies, and medical centers with leadership roles in precision medicine
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