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

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Pharmaceutical Executive magazine's advisory board meeting. I really enjoy the magazine, and I look forward to the opportunity to hear from others like me across the industry. The talent is always impressive, the discussions are always lively, and the topics cover everything from the problems in R&D pipelines through reimbursement.  Among the many topics we discussed was the concept of industry perception, and one question kept haunting my mind.

You've seen my kind before: our brows are always furrowed, we chain women to railroad tracks, and we have a maniacal laugh that we use whenever we sense fear in others.  I can't tell you exactly when I became a villain (it's all pretty much a blur).  But I can explain why, and maybe you should join me!

In 1943, an American  psychologist named Abraham Maslow published a very important paper based on his studies of healthy and successful people like Albert Einstein.  He wanted to know what separated these individuals from others -- how were their drives and motivations different from their peers.  Maslow observed that many of the day-to-day priorities for these people were different -- they did not need to spend their time worrying about where to get food and how to stay safe, and so they were able to spend their time on bigger goals and needs.  Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" as it became known defined a natural order and progression of human needs.  Can his reasoning be applied to organizations as well as people?

As many of you know, SAS has been working very hard on applying advanced analytics to detect and prevent healthcare fraud and abuse.  Those who attended the event will recall that this solution was demonstrated in our 6th Annual Health and Life Sciences Executive Conference and received a ton of interest.  North Carolina's Senator Kay Hagan recently spoke in Congress about the severity of this problem and SAS' innovative approach to solving it.

For more information, I'm including a link to a video demonstrating the solution concept, and you can also visit the fraud section of sas.com. 

I have a way you and your company can make more money.  It will reduce your operating costs.  It will improve employee productivity and job satisfaction.  It will make your customers happier with your products and services.  You can do it in less than a day, and it will not cost you a single dime to fully implement.  Interested?

I hope everyone had a great holiday last week (at least here in the US).  I had intended to get a blog post out before I left on vacation, but too many other things flooded my calendar.  While I was out, several friends forwarded me some really noteworthy articles, so I thought I'd take this week's blog post to highlight them.

Your Twitter data is being sold today.  A lead story on ReadWriteWeb today reports how a Texas company has harvested 500 million Twitter messages and 1 billion user relationships, and is now offering the data for sale.  I wrote several weeks ago about the disturbing loss of data privacy we are seeing, and this case is an excellent example.  The question now is how far are we away from seeing this with health-related information?  Closer than you might think.

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.