By William Lensch, George Daley, and Leonard Zon of the Stem Cell Research Program at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Boston Children's Hospital
Social, global network clears bottlenecks in pediatric medical knowledge
This post, third of three parts, is adapted from Children’s Hospital Boston Critical Care Medicine Chief Dr. Jeffrey Burns’ recent talk at the IBM Impact 2011 Global Conference. Read Dr. Burns’ first and second post.
Overcoming the random “dosing” of medical training
This post, second of three parts, is adapted from Children’s Hospital Boston Critical Care Medicine Chief Dr. Jeffrey Burns’ recent talk at the IBM Impact 2011 Global Conference. Read Dr. Burns’ first post.
Crowdsourcing discovery: Scientists tap citizenry for data collection
By Tom Ulrich
What do a project cataloging pictures of galaxies, an RNA folding game, and a call for people with diabetes to contribute data all have in common?
Each is part of a new revolution in science. Called "citizen science" this revolution takes science out of traditional academic or industrial environments and into the population at large, asking the general public to take part in activities that further particular areas of research.
Medicine “can’t move forward” without information technology
(This post, the first of three, is adapted from a talk Jeffrey Burns, MD, MPH, gave at IBM’s Impact 2011 Global Conference in April. For the full talk, jump to 44:37 in this video.)
Proteomics: A young field offering an unprecedented range of biological discovery
By Alex Kentsis
“What is proteomics?” Answering this simple question was the motivation for the Proteomics 2011, an annual symposium hosted by Judith and Hanno Steen of the Steen & Steen lab and The Proteomics Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, which featured global innovators and local advances in proteomics.
As a video at the start of the symposium showed, it’s a question that elicits a wide range of answers:
Disruptive technology: Advanced computing comes to health care
By Keeley Wray
The recent Bio-IT World meeting featured some exciting forecasts about disruptive healthcare advances from advanced computing technology.
We’re closer than ever to process streamlining, artificial intelligence and combining the best ideas from other industries.
Genetic diseases: accelerating therapy
Gene therapy, still experimental but beginning to enter the clinic, attempts to utilize advanced molecular methods to treat and even reverse genetic diseases. The field started in earnest about 25 years ago and has had many setbacks along the way to its recent earliest successes.
International collaboration has been critical.
Docs rethink patient interaction with medical questionnaires, response rates climb
At a conference in Texas a couple of years ago, I found myself — as at all good national conferences — talking to a colleague from my own institution. As we browsed the poster session, we talked about our respective work.
Eugenia Chan works in the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, where I’m an emergency physician and health services researcher. I told Eugenia about The Online Advocate, a Web-based system I’d been developing for the past eight years. It screens patients and families for health-related social problems, provides feedback and helps them find services in their area that can assist them.
ADHD: Tracking a child’s behavior at home and in school with web-based tools
By Eugenia Chan
This is how it used to be when I saw a child with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: “You know, Dr. Chan, I really don’t think the medicine’s working,” the parent would tell me. “I just don’t see any difference in his behavior.”
“Well, the medicine has probably worn off by the time you see him at home,” I’d say. “What does his teacher think?”
“She hasn’t called me, so I assume there hasn’t been any trouble.” Then: “Oh — I was supposed to give her that questionnaire to fill out, wasn’t I? I’m so sorry, I totally forgot.”
Meta-analyses: Scientists combine study results to conduct powerful “uberstudies”
By Tom Ulrich
When you get down to it, science, particularly in the clinical realm, is something of a numbers game. An experiment or study’s weight depends greatly on its size (how many patients took part, how many times the experiment was repeated, etc.).
For any number of reasons, though, researchers may only be able to bring a few people into a study and collect limited data, restricting both the answers it can provide and the impact of those answers on the field. Such has been the case with autism, for example, where studies tend to be small and patient populations haven’t always been well defined.