FedProt - Facilitate clinical proteomics while protecting patient confidentiality!

 

I'm sure something like this will need security reviews etc., that are government specific, etc., but I've never seen anything like it.

Most of the hospitals in the US now use a turd sandwich of terribleness known as EPIC Systems for sharing/storing/transmitting all patient information. Google thinks that 78% of all patient information in the US is held within their systems. A large part of why it is so bad is because the absolute center or any system like this has to be making shitloads of money protecting patient privacy. When that is your number one or two focus, making a stable interface that doesn't require a dedicated IT team at every facility to keep it up and running has to fall to your 11th or 183rd priority. 

Imagine most quantitative proteomics workflows today. How well protected are those data? Imagine that you found a BRCA2 mutation absolutely on accident while doing something else. Could a very motivated insurance person trying to get out of paying a $900,000 cancer treatment get to those data? 

FedProt was designed to allow quantitative proteomic data (currently MaxQuant looks like it's the main support, but that's probably header editing) and sharing and transmitting and linking back to patient information. Again, I'm not at all qualified to dig into how secure it is or even some of the fancy maths on the statistics, but I think it might be the first entry to try and fill a critical area of need before we realize proteomics as diagnostics.