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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've never had so many responses to a blog post as I have from the one last week regarding my recent discussions with US political teams on health reform.  Clearly, the national attention -- from legislators all the way down to us lowly consumers -- is being directed at this ongoing evolution.  From emails to individuals stopping me in the halls to chat about it, people both within and outside the healthcare industry reached out to share their insights, perspectives and stories.  I thought I would take a moment to share with you a couple of them. 

First, let me take this opportunity to thank Congressman Etheridge and his team for putting together this event. There has never been a more important time to come together and discuss healthcare, and there has never been a better place to do it than North Carolina.

My name is Jason Burke, and I head up the Health and Life Sciences Global Practice at SAS Institute. As the world’s largest privately held software company, SAS has been on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 Best Companies To Work for 12 consecutive years. A big part of that recognition comes from the heavy emphasis we place on the health and welfare of our employees – an emphasis that includes wellness programs, preventative care, high reimbursement coverage, and even an onsite health care center available to all employees. We estimate that in 2007 we saved 46,882 employee hours (about $2.2M) as a direct result of our focus on healthy, happy, and therefore more productive employees.

My job, however, is not about delivering healthcare to our employees. My job is about working with other companies across the nation and around the world to identify how we can use information to transform healthcare. No single hospital, health insurer, pharmaceutical company, or university will ever have enough information on its own to drive the needed changes in our healthcare system. It is only by sharing analytical insights between these various constituents that we will find the keys to better quality, lower costs, and improved lives for patients. And this is one of the reasons North Carolina is such a compelling place to be in healthcare – we have some of the strongest health-related research, education, management and delivery capabilities in the United States today.

North Carolinians and US citizens across our nation are seeing an unprecedented level of interest and activity associated with electronic medical records by both public and private institutions. And it is easy to see why – patients and their care providers should have access to all available health-information any time and any place. But while the need for better information availability and use is critical, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the goal of healthcare transformation can be met with electronic data collection. The keys to improving healthcare quality and decreasing healthcare costs are found in what we do with the information we collect – the critical insights we can gleen around questions such as care effectiveness, quality management, fraud and abuse detection and prevention, and the promise of personalized medicine. We need to move away from a world where we are constantly trying to find out what has happened in a person’s health experience, and move to a world where we can predict what a person’s health experience will be: what risks are present, what treatments will be most effective, and the best steps that can be taken to avoid costly and potentially chronic or fatal illness and disease.

Today, we find ourselves feeling the winds of changes on the horizon, and regardless of your employer’s financial interests or your particular political persuasion, we all can agree that we need more health in healthcare, and I’m pleased to be in a state like North Carolina that will be leading the way. Thank you again.

Anyone that knows me well knows that I dislike politics. It may be the scientist in me always looking for facts to take center stage. Or it may be the pacifist side of me always wanting everyone to just get along and be happy. So it is more than a little ironic that I found myself this week knee-deep in the political waters of US healthcare reform. I survived, in no small part to Kathy Hahn, my ambassador here in SAS who knows the ins and outs of government like a great concert violinist knows her strings. What I learned this week was eye-opening.

Last time, I gave an update on the SAS Health and Life Sciences Executive Conference that was recently held on our campus here in Cary.  Dr. John Halamka, one of our keynote speakers, spent some time discussing the challenges in defining "meaningful use", a term used to qualify an organization's adoption of health IT for purposes of federal funding.  The term is actually undefined in the legislation, and since it is linked to the money, there is a lot of activity now within the industry to better define what this means.  A lot of activity. 

My family and I frequently visit a local restaurant called Elmo’s Diner.  Elmos (no relation to Sesame Street) is exactly what you would expect in a diner – comfort food served in a relaxed environment at an affordable price.  The restaurant, which has 2 locations convenient to UNC and Duke University, is frequented by just about everyone – college deans and poor freshman sitting next to each other enjoying brunch.  My wife and I usually go on a diet once or twice a year to fight back the inevitable weight gains associated with western carbohydrate-rich eating habits, but our weekly Elmo’s trip (usually for a breakfast) is reserved for a cheat – high praise from people craving anything vaguely resembling bread.

Yesterday, I was invited to attend a Regional White House Forum on Health Reform in Greensboro, NC.  This was the fourth of five forums being held across the US (the others being Michigan, Vermont, Iowa, and California).  The forums represent the next step following the Obama administration's call last December asking Americans to host and participate in Health Care Community Discussions.  Over 9,000 people got involved and submitted 3,276 group reports, and over 30,000 participant surveys were completed.  The community discussion findings are available online, and if you are interested in what happened in these 5 regional forums, you can see transcripts, slides, and videos on http://healthreform.gov/whitehouseforums.html.  On Monday, the White House also released a report covering this topic as well; it is worth a read.

For those that might be interested, Glen de Vries at Medidata and I recorded a podcast for BioIT World magazine that is now up on BioIT World's website. The podcast focuses on how the technology landscape is changing within the pharmaceutical and broader healthcare markets.  I always enjoy talking with Glen; as I've shared before on this blog, he and I share a common view of the opportunity for innovation through the application of technology.  Please post any feedback you would like to share as well.

28,720. That's approximately how many words (by my word processor's count) it takes to appropriate $20B for the US healthcare system.  At least, that's about how many words dedicated to healthcare appear in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (you know, the stimulus bill).  Merriam-Webster defines a “bolus” as a large dose of medicine given for the purpose of rapidly achieving the needed therapeutic concentration.  I'd say that about sums it up.

This week's guest blog post comes to use from David Handelsman, Life Sciences Business Solutions Manager at SAS.  You can read more about David here.

In just the past week, we’ve seen two fascinating examples of improbable collisions.  In orbit, two satellites unintentionally smashed into each other at high speed.  While the probability of this occurring can certainly be calculated by NASA, that probability has to be quite low considering we’re talking about a 4-dimenional collision (x,y and z-planes, along with time), at very high speeds.  If you could imagine hitting one bullet with another, and doing it blindfolded, you’d have an idea how unlikely this collision would be.

My role at SAS puts me in an interesting position. Because I oversee 3 distinct (though converging) markets – healthcare, health plans, and life sciences – I often find myself needing to switch mental gears many times during the day. A 9:00 meeting might be related to drug development, my 10:00 about fraudulent health claims, and my 11:00 about selling to physicians (and yes, I have a lot of meetings). Besides making for interesting days, I’m fortunate to be able to see areas of overlap and commonality. Such is the case with protocols.

This week has served as a stark reminder of how much evolution is left to do in the health and life sciences ecosystem.  On the one hand, we are coming into a time of real investment via the federal economic stimulus package that for the first time places health IT fully into focus.  On the other hand, we are facing massive job losses across all markets, but especially in the pharmaceutical business where thousands of people have already lost their jobs, and likely more to follow.  How real and valuable is the change we are seeing?