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Mount Sinai researchers working at the center will be able to conduct scholarly evaluations of blockchain-enabled solutions and build and test their own prototypes within the Mount Sinai Health System. The center also plans to partner with health care and technology companies working on blockchain projects for clinical medicine and biomedical research.

“At Mount Sinai, we bring to the table deep expertise in biomedical data, machine learning, and data governance,” says Dr. Zimmerman. “This experience will allow us to address many of the most promising uses for blockchain in biomedicine with the goal of improving health care delivery and reducing costs.”

NIST offers guide to secure EHR data on mobile devices

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently released free guidelines on how to protect EHR information on mobile devices.

“Specifically, we show how security engineers and IT professionals, using commercially available and open-source tools and technologies that are consistent with cybersecurity standards, can help health care organizations that use mobile devices [smartphones and tablets] share patients’ health records more securely. We use a layered security strategy to achieve these results,” the practice guide states.

The publication, “Securing Electronic Health Records on Mobile Devices,” is broken down into five volumes: an executive summary; approach, architecture, and security characteristics; how-to guides; standards and control mapping; and risk assessment and outcomes.

The guide includes an example solution to the security issue, which was developed by the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence using commercially available products. However, the center does not endorse such products. “The example solution is described in the ‘how-to’ guide, which provides organizations with detailed instructions to re-create it,” the publication states. “The NCCOE’s approach secures patient information when practitioners access it with mobile devices.”

The guide can be viewed or downloaded at www.bit.ly/NCCOE_guide.

HudsonAlpha develops genetics tool to tackle phenotypic data

A team of researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology has introduced PyxisMap, a tool for zeroing in on the genetic variants that may be responsible for a patient’s medical condition.

“PyxisMap collects the symptoms of a patient in the form of free text or ordered lists, then runs the extracted terms against a data structure containing relationships between these symptoms (or phenotype terms) and genes and variants in order to rank these genomic regions based on disease associations,” according to a press release from HudsonAlpha, a nonprofit genetics and genomics research institute in Huntsville, Ala.

The tool can be used alone or in tandem with software for studying the likely impact of genetic variants identified in patients, such as Hudson­Alpha’s CODICEM software. “Integration of phenotypic data allows identification of variants specifically related to the patient’s symptoms,” Liz Worthey, PhD, a member of the team that developed PyxisMap and director of software development and informatics at HudsonAlpha, told CAP TODAY. “The tool incorporates information on disease genes from standard disease databases as well as integrating the most up-to-date phenotype-gene associations recently published in academic journals.

“By combining both the variant impact and the phenotype ranking tools, you can quickly hone in on the variants underlying an individual patient’s disease,” Dr. Worthey continues. When used together in a pilot study, PyxisMap and CODICEM placed the causal variant among the top 20 potential variants more than 90 percent of the time, she adds.

PyxisMap is currently available for research use only. The technology is being used in several research projects focused on identifying deleterious genetic variation in people with rare or undiagnosed diseases.

For more information about Pyxis­Map, email Dr. Worthey at lworthey@hudsonalpha.org.

Dr. Aller teaches informatics in the Department of Pathology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He can be reached at raller@usc.edu. Hal Weiner is president of Weiner Consulting Services LLC, Eugene, Ore. He can be reached at hal@weinerconsulting.com.