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.

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.