BioWindows™
When dealing with health issues, we need to consider two important concepts – nurture and your genetics. The news media coverage surrounding the amazing discoveries of modern genomics and molecular biology during the past decade can lead us to believe that the diseases we contract are almost solely determined by our own faulty genetic code - your genome. While the activity of your genes are of the highest priority in understanding your disease and how to treat it, understanding your environment is also important – your nurture.
BioWindows is a very sophisticated artificial intelligence program that analyzes the genomic information from our nano-biochips. Comparing this information with a central repository of genomic profiles, patient survey profiles and reference data provides appropriate treatment scenarios for a variety of pathological conditions, ailments and diseases. We, as human beings, function best in a wholesome environment and your genes are no different. All complex diseases are the result of gene-environment interactions over time and what you eat, drink and breathe, think and feel impacts how your genes do their jobs. Environmental factors, along with our genetic variability, create the individual differences we see in disease susceptibility and prescription drug sensitivity by altering our gene expression patterns.
By uncovering underlying lifestyle and environmental patterns and interfacing them with genomic profiles from our nano-biochips we hope to be able to pinpoint specific environmental and lifestyle triggering causes that may be pushing you and others from health to disease. Personal data, and the genomic data from our nano-biochips, will become part of an ever-growing international database to assist scientists in their search for personalized causes and cures for the many diseases that affect us.
Personal Information Security
The security of your personal health information is not only our highest priority at Iris BioTechnologies; it is the law. The Security Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that we ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic health information we create, receive, maintain, or transmit. It also requires us to ensure that technical security measures are in place to protect networks, computers and other electronic devices against any reasonably anticipated threats or hazards of this personal information. Only you or those you designate are able to access this database using your personalized password. For further information about securing your personal medical information visit the Health and Human Services Civil Rights Department web site http://www.os.dhhs.gov/ocr/hipaa/
De-identifying protected health information under the HIPAA privacy rule
Iris BioTechnologies may release this information by using statistical methods that insures you cannot be identified or by removing certain pieces of information that are personal identifiers like your name, address or phone number. For more in depth information on the privacy rule and research visit the National Institutes of Health web site http://privacyruleandresearch.nih.gov/pr_08.asp
Suggestions for taking the Iris medical history survey
- Please take as much time as needed to accurately complete this paperless database.
- Carefully and completely respond to each of the questions as they apply to you.
- Please make your best educated guess for each question even if you are not sure of the exact date.
- You are encouraged to login and revise and/or update information in your personal profile at any time that new information becomes available.
- If at any time you feel uncomfortable in answering any of the questions, or choose not to answer any of the questions, you always have the option of not responding. However, by providing us with the most accurate and complete personal and family history, the more helpful this database becomes in providing you with the most useful and predictive disease profile for your specific condition.