March 6, 2014

FDA’s path forward for open data and Next Generation Sequencing

Taha Kass-Hout, MD, MS

FDA has established an Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation (OITI) under the Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO) in order to spur technology innovation. The following presentation highlight two exciting initiatives within OITI:

openFDA: When implemented in September 2014, openFDA will offer easy access to FDA public data and highlight projects using these data in both the public and private sector to further regulatory or scientific missions, educate the public, and save lives.

Utility NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) in the Internet cloud: FDA is facing growing NGS needs for processing internal genome sequencing data as well as the NGS data from industry submissions. The NGS initiative is planning and developing a cloud-base Big Data platform and analytics for robust, secure and controlled data storage, analysis, and collaboration and potentially sharing public-access genome sequencing information.

I gave this presentation last week at the 2014 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference.