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March 19, 2015

Pitt, CMU, UPMC join forces to use health care “big data”

The heads of Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University and UPMC announced a new Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance (www.healthdataalliance.com) on March 17 that, they said, will use big data to create everything from better detection of disease outbreaks to commercial applications for data use in health care.

Digitally collected health data will fuel the work of the alliance, which will pair the efforts of Pitt’s Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data under Michael Becich, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and CMU’s Center for Machine Learning and Health, headed by Eric Xing in the Department of Machine Learning.

Chancellor Patrick Gallagher called the alliance “a partnership where the whole is greater than the parts. We are creating a community that can accomplish things that no institution can do alone.”

Said UPMC head Jeffrey Romoff: “Together, we will create the next generation of health care, the next generation of information technology and the next generation of Pittsburgh.”

The new alliance, added CMU President Subra Suresh, has the potential to improve patient care, increase people’s personal control over health care decisions and reduce costs for health care providers and consumers because of earlier disease detection and treatment. It should also create new companies, add new jobs and attract new talent to the region.

UPMC will contribute $10 million-$20 million a year for the alliance’s initial five-six years, said Romoff. Suresh said its work will involve “dozens and dozens of faculty and students from different parts of campus[es] who will work together,” for projects that eventually involve “hundreds of people from across institutions, both locally and globally.”

The project was praised by Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, who called it “eds/meds 2.0. This is eds/meds on steroids. … I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

Gallagher noted that doctors today work mostly with data from patients’ singular visits to their offices, which take place once disease symptoms have become evident. If doctors had “the full mix of data” being gathered digitally, that might work preventively.

“The idea of this being a kind of moon shot for health care data is legitimate,” concluded Romoff, when asked whether it was fair to compare the alliance to another large collaborative effort, the Manhattan Project to build the country’s first atomic bomb.

However, he added, “I will be very disappointed … if five years from now the project looks anything like it does now because we have not been as creative, as innovative and, if you’ll forgive the term, as explosive as we need to be.”

From left: UPMC’s Jeffrey Romoff and Carnegie Mellon’s Subra Suresh listen to Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher at the March 16 press conference announcing the new health data alliance.

From left: UPMC’s Jeffrey Romoff and Carnegie Mellon’s Subra Suresh listen to Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher at the March 16 press conference announcing the new health data alliance.

—Marty Levine