We are on the cusp of a revolution in biomedical research information technology, driven by two other revolutionary advances and a mandate. The emergence of systems biology has made it possible to envision a far deeper understanding of the processes of life, both in health and sickness and at every stage of development. In the realm of information technology, computation, communications, and access to virtually the entire fund of human knowledge are about to become ubiquitous and invisible; computers are shrinking and becoming transparent, taking us into an age in which many of our creations will be imbued with intelligence. I have been thinking about this for a long time, and wanted to share some ideas about the implications of the changes that are about to happen in the realm of biomedical research IT and the opportunities and challenges they present.
Research IT is going to undergo an order-of-magnitude jump in the scope and quality of IT services required by researchers, but investigators are largely unaware of the full implications of this sea change. Investigators who are also clinicians (i.e., most clinical researchers) are accustomed to hospital IT systems that are highly reliable and more or less seamlessly integrated. With the emergence of systems biology and its increasingly pervasive presence in clinical research, research is becoming increasingly IT-dependent. Investigators naturally expect research IT to be as easy (to them) and seamless as hospital IT.
This has placed unprecedented demands on research IT staff, who are often research associates or even investigators who happen to have programming skills. Since research IT has traditionally been funded project-by-project, research IT has traditionally been done using an ad hoc approach, with programming as the single biggest and most visible aspect of the IT component. This has reinforced the common perception among clinicians that all IT staff are programmers and that IT is primarily a programming problem; ergo, problems with deficiencies in research IT are personnel problems, not infrastructure problems.
Clinicians are usually unaware of the diversity of roles and responsibilities involved in clinical care IT, and also unaware of the huge investment in infrastructure involved. This infrastructure is multi-faceted, including but not limited to such aspects as brick-and-mortar, copper-and-glass, standards adoption and implementation, human resource policies and training, and best-practices SOPs throughout.
Since research IT has traditionally been funded project-by-project, there is little infrastructure in place. The NIH Roadmap initiative has funded the initial steps in changing AHC institutional culture, but the necessary changes are transformational in nature, not incremental, so overcoming the inertial forces is more than a matter of money.
The clinical care IT investment in infrastructure does not automatically apply to researchers' needs, for several reasons. The requirements for research IT have been very different from those of clinical care IT. The cultures are very different as well; since many research IT staff are not IT professionals, there is less awareness of and/or commitment to IT best practices. With research projects operating in relative isolation from one another, there has been no movement toward the adoption of data interchange standards.
Until recently all this has mattered little, but with the coming of systems biology and the increasing shift toward interdisciplinary research across multiple institutions, it is becoming more and more apparent that institutional commitment to research IT infrastructure is critical to the future of the AHC. The nature and scope of IT infrastructure required to suppor this type of research includes all the same aspects as hospital IT - brick-and-mortar, copper-and-glass, standards adoption and implementation, human resource policies and training, and best-practices SOPs throughout.
Meanwhile, IT itself is approaching a two-pronged revolutionary shift akin to but much more transformational than the desktop PC revolution of the 1980's or the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the 1990's. A decade from now we will no doubt still have desktop and laptop PCs, but they will have become a small part of a pervasive computing fabric that will interpenetrate our personal, organizational, and professional lives to a degree that is as unimaginable now as the current state of the WWW was twenty years ago. Our homes, appliances, vehicles, implements, documents, even our clothing will be part of this fabric. Computation and communication will be utilities whose service points are everywhere.
In parallel, immersive computing environments now common in the gaming world will become much more realistic and will become integral parts of our organizational and personal lives. We will take for granted the ability to conduct face-to-face meetings in a virtual-world location, though the participants' real-world locations are widely dispersed. This promises to become a new mode of communication that will enable as-yet-unforeseeable advances in education, research, and social networks.
What does all this mean? It's far too early to offer any neat summation of the potential implications. What is safe to say is that we are at a juncture in history that will be looked back upon in millennia to come as a transition point of at least the same magnitude as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, what we are seeing appears to me like a combination of the two - a transformational process affecting every aspect of human life on the planet Earth. It's an amazing time to be alive.
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