American Heart Association Precision Medicine Platform

Integrating the open science movement with impactful discoveries in science, velocity of technology, and raw power of cloud computing has led to an unprecedented opportunity for scientific discovery. The American Heart Association recently established the Precision Medicine Platform1 through the efforts of multiple American Heart Association volunteers and a collaboration with Amazon Web Services. The cloud-based platform, powered by Amazon Web Services and available at https://precision.heart.org, was founded on the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable)2 and includes secure collaboration areas (workspaces) and an open sharing area. The goals of the platform are to democratize data, to make it easy to search across orthogonal data sets, to provide a secure workspace to leverage the power of cloud computing, and to provide a forum for users to share insights. Multiple learning tools are available, including video tutorials, templates using open interactive programming framework, and a forum for interaction among community members.3When accessing large public data sets today, researchers have to find, access, download, and interpret each data set individually. Researchers must untangle and interpret the data and then expend resources to house the data. In addition, the lack of harmonization across multiple data sets obviates the ability of researchers to combine data sources and to confirm or generate cogent findings.The platform aims to address these challenges through a transparent and …