A Shot in the Arm - Jason Burke on Health and Life Sciences

Dave Handelsman had a really great article on Applied Clinical Trials this month related to improving safety and longer-term healthcare through the application of advanced analytics to social media.  When many people think of using analytics on social media to improve healthcare, they are usually thinking of the possibility of seeing or learning something new -- some previously unknown fact or trend, be it healthy or unhealthy, that would otherwise be difficult to find.  There is no question that approach has value, and we see it already being applied in the commercial side of pharmaceutical companies.  But Dave sees a broader opportunity.

This week's guest blog post comes to us from Craig Nestel, Business Solutions Manager in the SAS Global Healthcare and Life Sciences Practice.  Craig discusses how competitiveness in the life sciences market now requires companies adapt from their long-standing broad-focused practices. You can read more about Craig here.

Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge advocate of intelligent software architectures.  Design and governance of good architecture serves as the foundation for powerful, extensible, and scalable software solutions.  Last week I wrote a story for Technorati about some of the problems with our current health reform approach, and I highlighted architecture as one of the missing puzzle pieces.  To that end, this week I share an interview Drew Foglia, one of the minds behind SAS' current thinking in services-oriented architecture for our health and life sciences solutions.

Does your organization use agile development?  For our health and life sciences solutions, we have historically relied on waterfall development: it is well understood, easily maps to regulatory requirements around traceability, and is conservative enough for commercial software companies to feel confident in the outcomes.  But waterfall places some assumptions and prerequisites on development processes that don't seem to fit anymore, so my team and I are implementing agile.  I mentioned in my education post a couple of weeks ago some team training related to agile methods.  Here's the scoop.

Over the past couple of weeks, a number of situations have emerged that have highlighted for me how the nature and veracity of online security threats are changing.  For example, one of my neighbors sent a Facebook message to her social network indicating that she had encountered some problems while traveling in England, and was looking for one of her friends to help her out.  The biggest problem turned out to be that she was not in London or having any problems -- her Facebook account had been hacked.

This week was designated Education Week by SAS' CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight.  For those that don't know, Dr. Goodnight is an outspoken supporter of education: he has endowed several college professorships; has made education the focus of SAS' philanthropy; launched the award-winning SAS® Curriculum Pathways® program of educational resources; and together with his wife co-founded an independent college preparatory day school called Cary Academy, a model school for integrating technology into all facets of education.  So where does education rate in your life?

One of the blogs I read each day is ReadWriteWeb.  If you're not familiar with it, RWW is one of the world's more popular blogs, with daily articles on web trends, products, and emerging technologies.  This week, they are running a series of 5 articles on the top web trends in 2009.  I thought it might be interesting to look at each of these trends from the perspective of the health and life sciences industries -- are we using these technologies yet, and if not, when will we likely start?

An interesting exchange of articles related to cloud computing surfaced this week.  Cory Doctorow over at the Guardian wrote a denouncement of cloud computing, espousing that "the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes."  Jon Stokes over on Ars Technica delivered a partial counter-argument, clarifying some subtle distinctions in the arguments: cloud computing offers user experiences not otherwise possible, and that the risk of abuse is really more about consumer-facing as opposed to business-to-business cloud services.  From my vantage point, though, the biggest question is not being asked.

One of the things in which I take some pride in working for SAS is our track record in building software that satisfies the needs of customers and regulators from a quality and compliance perspective.  One person who has been a long-standing driver and contributor to that success is Sue Carroll.  As part of my ongoing series of interviews with SAS staff, I talk to Sue about the role quality management plays in SAS.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've recently taken on responsibility for health and life sciences research and development here in SAS.  I have had (and continue to have) quite a bit to learn, and one of the people who has really gone above and beyond in helping me get up to speed is Tim Arthur.  As part of an ongoing series of blog posts where I interview different people across SAS about their projects, interests, and activities, I talk to Tim on what its like to try and keep complex SAS R&D projects on the right tracks.

Ari Juels over on the CNET Security news site wrote a fascinating article yesterday on data privacy.  The basic thrust of the article is that as the world continues to push forward with adopting technologies that generate growing volumes of personally-attributable information, it will become increasingly difficult (if not impossible) to be anonymous in our day-to-day lives.  I believe his predictions will prove to be fairly accurate.  In a somewhat passing comment he mentions the opportunity to protect privacy in healthcare, but despite the ever-present opportunity, I don't think we are very far down the path of figuring this out.

Since I joined SAS a little more than 4 years ago, many customers have communicated to me that they wanted more insight into SAS: what we are working on, who is working on it, and what our current thinking is on technology topics.  So I've decided to create a new series of blog posts where I interview different people across SAS about their projects, interests, and activities.  In this segment, I interview Peter Villiers, one of the senior developers in the health and life sciences R&D organization, about a new solution called the SAS Clinical Standards Toolkit.

Well, I’m finally back to writing my blog again.  This break has been the longest period I’ve gone without writing a post.  Usually, I shoot for one post a week, and I’ve had a pretty good record, but circumstances and other priorities conspired against me recently, so now I’m playing a little catch up.

At the end of last week, word came down that SAS' health and life sciences team lost one of our own.  Joe Carter -- known to many as the face of SAS Drug Development -- lost his battle with cancer on Friday.  It is never easy to hear about losing someone, but Joe's absence will be particularly felt by his many friends in the industry.  And it is a stark reminder that our research with cancer needs to move more quickly. [Updated below]

A number of readers have raised the issue of data quality to me over the past few months, especially as it relates to getting value (or not) from advanced analytics.  So I wanted to pass along that SAS will be hosting a free webcast next week specifically about data quality. 

Got Bad Data? Part 2
Wednesday, June 17, at 1 p.m. ET USA 

It is the second in a series of live webcasts focused specifically on this problem, and will be delivered by Guarav Verma and Anne Milley, two of my colleagues here in SAS who live this area of technology.   Some of the topics they plan to cover include data quality profiling, continuous improvement, data collection with closed-loop monitoring, and of course supporting analytical applications.  For healthcare organizations, I believe they are even going to offer a free assessment to viewers following the webcast  using their data...should be interesting.

Oh, and if you didn't manage to catch Part 1, you can view the replay of it here.