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