Three CBRC Briefings to Take Place in June on Capitol Hill

The month of June promises to be a busy one for the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus (CBRC), as it welcomes three prominent researchers in very different, yet equally valuable, fields to Washington, DC, to present on their important scientific discoveries to Capitol Hill members and staff. First, on June 3rd, Dr. Atul Butte of Stanford University held a briefing on Using Genes to Redefine Disease. Dr. Butte is at the forefront of the nascent field of translational bioinformatics—a field that seeks to create new diagnostics and therapeutics from genome-era information and data. He discussed how new uses for publicly available data have allowed us to ask new questions, including the nature of disease. Dr. Butte is able to show how using genes to redefine disease enables the discovery of new causes for disease, suggests novel roles for drugs in the treatment of disease, and, for the first time, allows us to probe the inner commonality across diseases that previously seemed dissimilar.

The CRBC welcomes Dr. William Wulf of the University of Virginia on June 10th with the timely topic of Improving the US’s Innovation Ecology. Dr. Wulf, the AT&T Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, recently issued a stern warning to a gathering of his colleagues, saying, “Engineering needs innovation to stay ahead. We’re not going to be able to compete with China and India on cost. We need to compete on quality.” Dr. Wulf will examine the ecology of interacting laws, regulations, and institutions that are intended to support innovation in the United States, but that are currently outdated and not well suited to the technologies of today and tomorrow.

Finally, on June 17th, the CRBC is pleased to have Dr. Chad Boult, Professor of Public Health, and Director of the Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, give a presentation on Improving the Quality and Efficiency of Health Care for Older Americans. Dr. Boult has long been interested in developing and testing novel approaches to organizing, financing, and delivering health care to older populations, as well as improving the outcomes experienced by people whose chronic illnesses require care that spans the hospital, post-acute, and home care settings. His briefing will focus on the concept of Guided Care, a new model of comprehensive health care that constitutes a type of “medical home” for high-cost Medicare beneficiaries. In the first year of a recent federally funded, multi-site, randomized controlled trial at Johns Hopkins, Guided Care significantly increased the quality of health care for this population while reducing the total cost of its care by 11% ($1,365 per beneficiary per year).

The Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus is fortunate to have three such distinguished researchers from such varied fields of study come to Washington this month, and be able to provide a forum where Members and staff can interact directly with them directly. For more information on locations of each of these briefings, as well as a complete listing of all 2009 CBRC briefings, please go to the CLS calendar.