e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture

In the past decade during IEEE sponsored professional meetings(2),(3) the theme of "Global Health Transformation through true Interoperability" was brought to the forefront in the inaugural keynotes. Some technologies that started with the monitoring of hemodynamic variables of astronauts by NASA in the 60s were further developed by the Department of Defense for the purposes of treating their injured in the battlefield via Telemedicine. By August 511, 1997 President Clinton signed the first piece of legislation that was allowing the concepts of homecare to be tried to measure cost and medical effectiveness. With the development of Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), social media, intelligent agents, mobile technology, sensors, and pieces of clothing containing them a new generation of devices have been created offering new possibilities for improvements particularly in areas such assist of living (for those suffering from chronic conditions), and homecare in general. The use of wearable computing in general and the use of augmented reality in the developed world in particular offer some unique opportunities to improve outcomes. In the 21(st) Century and as the Health Care and Public Health infrastructure intersect deeper into the many Information Technology (IT) subfields, abundant and formidable changes can occur that will allow society to shift current systems into some where wellness and disease prevention will be the focus. Many changes can affect positively medical and cost effective outcomes as well as the elimination of medical errors and patient safety for example. In these arenas, with the convergence of science, technology and with Information Technology acting as a catalyst for change, health care systems around the world are slowly shifting from -hospital based" ones into distributed systems that include: hospitals, clinics, homecare systems with treatment and management of chronic diseases for the elderly via Internet, etc. In order to achieve such visions, multiple efforts have been tried for creating electronic health record as well as the information highway for their use. In the US the health system is very scattered and most hospital systems do not contain for example mental health, dental health and or vaccine registry information. On one hand through major medical research the emergence of clinical and health data repositories or "Intelligent Data Warehouses" that not only include traditional clinical data, but also advanced imaging, molecular medicine, tissue micro-array analysis and other bioinformatics information is available. These increasingly multi-modality data warehouses are constantly updated, continuously expanded and populated with millions of records. Although these repositories of electronic information can be leveraged not only to improve point of care clinical decision-making for individual patients, they can also support population health chronic and infectious disease analytics (i.e., epidemiology and surveillance), cost efficient multi-center (e.g., and multi-country) clinical trials, and comprehensive post-market pharmaco-vigilance. On the other hand the integration of healthcare and public health is a major concern as well. Globalization (i.e., the interdependencies that each country has with many others) for example has raised the sense of awareness through "the information highway". In 2004 the total production of flu vaccines coming to the US from the UK's Chiron had to be thrown away (approximately in the range of 42 to 44 million vaccines). During and since 2007 the US public has learnt through successive media stories related to: the death of pets due to food-import contamination, children's toys imports containing lead paint, food contamination, drug contamination, drug ingredients contaminated, etc. During 2008 we heard about: People getting very sick from fish containing the ciguatera toxin and Tab / drinking water containing about 36 different medications, e.g., antibiotics, antidepressants, etc. As the northern hemisphere prepared for the second wave of the 2009 H1N1 Flu Pandemic (which was expected to start around October 2009) all nations could have benefited by having epidemiology and surveillance data from all southern hemisphere nations available for the production of more "accurate" vaccines. In 2011 the European Union had to cut back in their consumption of vegetables and fruit because of an e-coli outbreak. Simultaneously the food from Asia in sonic cases was contaminated with radiation from the nuclear disaster caused by the combination of earthquake / tsunami at the Fukushima site. In South America the eruption of the volcano Puyehue in Chile closed all the airports in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and the south of Brazil. All of these events resulted in major conflicts regarding world demand for food supplies. Still the perfect opportunity to transform our health care systems to a strategy of disease prevention and wellness is in the horizon. Using information technology as an enabler, we can encompass a wide range of opportunities that can start at the cellular, molecular and genetics levels and go as far as population health. Initial immunization studies show the level of antibody titers against viral diseases depends on the circadian time of inoculation. The concepts of chronobiology and chrono-therapeutics can be used to generate disease prevention strategies based on these circadian-rhythm dependencies. Just imagine how the public could also be better protected not only against environmental threats, water contamination, food borne diseases through the use of remote sensing data and a worldwide food enterprise architecture, but through alerts that could flow into a person through Wearable Computing, Augmented Reality and the Veillances. Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom could "flow" into an individual alerting him/her that they need to immediately visit their doctor, or stop consuming certain products. Some examples of our current problem environment could change outcomes by using these tools: 1. Getting the right information at the right time ---the steroid injection that they got for pain from laboratory x (in Massachusetts) is contaminated ( Just in the USA, between September 2012 and March 2013 at least 44 people have died and over 700 are contaminated from fungal meningitis according to the CDC) and their life may be at risk; 2. Preventing potential water and or food poisoning --- on February 4(th,), 2013, a report regarding the drinking water in many places within the State of California containing large amounts of Arsenic. Since we eat year round vegetables and fruits, livestock, poultry, etc. from that State, it may require the public to be cautious. As discovery from new research expands our knowledge about our body, its genome, and the cause-effect of new drugs, it also provides an opportunity to bring not only all these types of information to the forefront of the patient regardless where she /he may be at, but enable the transition from a system that has focused on disease to one that will focus on wellness through prevention and hopefully improve the quality of our lives.