Lessons Learned from the Shared Pathology Informatics Network (SPIN): A Scalable Network for Translational Research and Public Health

The article by McMurry et al. in the current issue of JAMIA describes an innovative architecture to support National Health Information Networks (NHIN) that comprises a “… distributed approach to data storage in order to protect privacy and enable strong institutional autonomy to engender participation. The architecture provides oversight and transparency to ensure patient trust and allows variable levels of access according to investigator needs and institutional policies, defining a self-scaling architecture that encourages voluntary regional collaborations that coalesce to form a nationwide network …”.1 This work moves informatics a critical step forward in providing an open architecture that can support translational research and interface with appropriate depth to systems for public heath and clinical care. This linkage is crucially important for the sharing of biospecimens, and a valuable resource in this “–omics” era. Modern molecular medicine drives the demand for extensively annotated tissue specimens for basic science and translational … Correspondence and reprints: Michael J. Becich, MD, PhD, Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, 5230 Centre Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15232; e-mail: becich{at}pitt.edu)