

Counsyl Is Pioneering A New Bioinformatics Wave - ramanujan
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl

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_ihaque
Full disclosure: I work for Counsyl. (In fact, if you watch the video at the
bottom of the article, I'm the second speaker.)

The cool thing (well, one of many) about Counsyl is that there are a lot more
things going on than pure biology and bioinformatics. Making genomics truly
accessible is a software challenge that goes way beyond bioinformatics.
There's obviously statistics, machine learning, and robotics running the lab;
however, even more problems are pure _engineering_ tasks. For example:

\- How do you design the UI/UX around presenting data on 100 genes which can
cause severe illness, but which most doctors (let alone patients) have never
heard of?

\- How do you efficiently accept orders from clinics across the nation, using
a mix of web, paper, and EMR (electronic medical records) systems? (For bonus
credit: deal with EMRs shipping fresh today on Windows 3.1. For double bonus
credit: figure out how to bypass that ancient cruft and bring clinics into the
21st century.)

\- How do you bill insurance companies when it can be opaque to even find out
which insurance company pays for a given patient's procedures?

\- How can you share data with the scientific community in as open a way as
possible, without compromising patient privacy?

There's a huge amount of work to be done, so if you're interested in helping
out, give us a look: <https://www.counsyl.com/jobs/>.

~~~
bayesianhorse
Sounds tough. 100 SNPs/Genes are enough information to identify a lot of the
patients who are carriers, so even anonymizing would not really help. Then
again if someone is able to identify the SNPs of someone he doesn't need that
data.

It does look like a job I might be interested in, a year from now.

