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

Trend #1: Structured Data

I am so glad to see this one on the list, as I firmly believe we are "missing the boat" on this one.  Though none of the 3 companies profiled by RWW are in the healthcare ecosystem, one company (Wolfram|Alpha) does have some examples of both statistics and healthcare applications.  More generally, though, we simply have not seen the uptake in semantic web or other technologies that bring order to the chaos of health information.  Even large-scale electronic medical records systems largely focus on capturing unstructured text.  The W3C maintains a semantic web special interest group for health and life sciences, but I never hear anything about the work getting adopted or even sought.  They did hold a workshop in April of 2008, and the presentations are posted, and more information is on their wiki.  I'd really like to see a greater emphasis placed on this work -- there is so much more insight analytics can provide if we just take the time to get our data houses in order.

Trend #2: The Real-Time Web

What is the real-time web, you ask?  Think of services like Twitter and Friendfeed -- services that give you flowing information from federated information sources as it happens.  When you log in to Facebook and can see what your friends have been doing that day, that's the real-time web.  Unfortunately, there is very little "real-time" about healthcare.  For that matter, even "web" is a challenge.  Over the past year, we have seen both healthcare and life sciences firms more broadly embracing social media -- that is a good first step, and brings with it the associated aspects of real-time data.  But the game-changers -- real-time connectivity with patients, for example -- are still mainly Powerpoint. 

Trend #3: Personalization

In the context of the article, personalization refers to the ability to prioritize and filter information based on preferences and attributes of the user.  In healthcare, personalization could be one of those game-changers -- consider the potential to distill just the information relevant to a particular physician or patient, and deliver it via the best communication channel for that individual.  One example I know of is iGuard -- a service offering personalized alerts based on a patient's medications, and more will undoubtedly arise with the proliferation of personal health records and opt-in health programs.  The application of advanced analytics in this space (e.g., content targeting, response prediction) could be tremendous.  Of course, the risk here is loss of privacy (see my blog post from a few weeks ago).  And as I wrote back in March, identity management standards such as OpenID will be a critical enabler, and RWW further mentions data portability, OpenSocial, and attention profiling markup language (APML) as critical as well.  This topic is particularly important given the surprising announcement this week that the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health have launched a pilot program to allow members of the public to log in to government websites with their credentials from independent websites. 

Trend #4: Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

The rise of mobile computing, driven equally by business and consumer applications, has really been dramatic.  I was a skeptic at first about using a web browser on a mobile device; now I do it every day.  We've not seen a strong rise of health and life sciences specific use cases for mobile industry web applications, but I would argue that the ongoing advancement of telemedicine products and services should rightly fall into this category as well.  Now if you are like me, you are wondering "what is the world is 'augmented reality', and why is it attached to the topic of mobile?"  This term refers to overlaying real-time electronic information on top of a current real-world experience.  The video below gives an interesting demonstration of this concept.  I'm not aware of it having legs in healthcare yet, but it is interesting to think about how it might apply.  I think there is also going to be a longer-term need to combine this type of capability with the Personalization idea above so that I'm not seeing everything, just the things I want/need to see.

Trend #5: The Internet of Things 

Transmitters, sensors, and data for all: that's pretty much the idea behind this trend.  The internet-enable refrigerator -- capable of tell you when you are running low on milk and creating shopping lists -- is one of the more commonly cited examples of the internet of things.  And as opposed to just being able to track that UPS-delivered Amazon book shipment, you should be able to know a lot more -- the exact package contents, the current temperature, etc.  We have already seen 2 trends in health and life sciences related to one of these technologies, RFID.  Hospitals have been tagging all sorts of things (devices, instruments, drugs, even people) to prevent thefts, avoid medical errors, and locate the thing of interest within the hospital.  RFID is also the featured technology in the future of pharmaceutical supply chain, counterfeiting prevention, and distribution management, though the uptake has been slower than many would prefer.  If you are interested in more information about how RFID is used in our industry, check out the RFID in Healthcare Consortium.  These technologies are going to create large volumes of data over time, so you can expect analytics will be following close behind adoption.