Thank Heavens These People Didn't Design Our Interstate Highway System

Imagine a highway system where the people who wanted a highway from New York to Chicago built one.  And the people who wanted a highway from Cleveland to Saint Louis built themselves a road.   And the people who wanted a highway from Kansas City to Denver poured their own pavement.  And the people who needed to get from Dallas to Los Angeles constructed their own road.  And the people in Seattle who wanted to get to Miami blazed a long and impressive trail.

A mess?  Indeed.
An expensive mess?  Yep.
An unbelievable premise?  Sure.

Today we have a very expensive ALS "Registry" project that was implemented by the CDC.  We know little of its status because of the cone of silence that has enveloped those who are invited to participate in its annual meetings.  We know that it has passive surveillance of government records of ALS cases at its backbone, and we know that there is some self-enrollment that complements the mined data.

We also have a PRO-ACT database provided by NEALS that houses clinical trial data on many of the same people who are in the CDC's registry.

And the MDA has recently announced the launch of its own patient "registry" that will capture data related to patient care and natural histories.  We assume that this will house information on some people with ALS who have fragments of information in the CDC's "Registry" and the PRO-Act database, too.

And at the recent Team Gleason Summit, leading ALS researchers spoke of the need for some "big data" concepts of holistic views of patients so that every patient can be a research patient.  Oh, and nobody present involved with the CDC project or the MDA project mentioned those within earshot of the webcast.

A mess?  Indeed.
An expensive mess?  Yep.
An unbelievable premise?  We're living it.  Oh, and we're paying for it.