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

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.

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.

A few weeks ago, I decided to check up on my Facebook site.  I had not been on the site for a while -- no particular reason, just had not taken the time.  Anyway, when I looked at my own activity feed -- the one that shows what I've been doing -- it was a complete disaster.  There were activity items all over the place, items with titles that made no sense...it was something to behold.  None of my friends were bold enough to say anything, but I'm sure some of them had to be wondering what in the world I was doing.  But what I thought must be a some glitch in an application I had installed actually turned out to be a much bigger problem, one that related to my entire online identity.

If you haven't been seeing it already, now is a good time to start watching what is happening in the identity management space.  This technology area is not one I have spent a lot of time in, but several things I've noticed recently lead me to think we may be approaching the tipping point on this technology.  In the face of horizontal identity management standards with multi-market appeal, it will be interesting to see whether any of the vertically-specific standards efforts will survive and thrive.  And regardless of who wins, adoption will open some doors for analytics.

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.

With the annual CDISC International Interchange conference beginning this week, I’m reminded of how far the life sciences industries have come in embracing and adopting standards.  CDISC – the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium – includes members from more than 200 industry companies, all supporting the notion that – across an industry – data standards are an important necessity.   Long gone are the days when businesses questioned the value of company standards, and across the life sciences industries the value of cross-company standards are no longer questioned.  The discussion has fundamentally moved from “what” to “why” to “how”, and now “when”.  As will no doubt be discussed at length during the Interchange, there are now a wealth of examples that describe how to apply the CDISC standards to the business of clinical research data management.
 
When you think about, it’s actually quite extraordinary.   Companies have volunteered their staff to contribute to this effort, knowing the benefit helps their competitors as much as it helps themselves.   As is often said, a rising tide does lift all boats.  Data capture (CDASH) standards have just been approved; data submission (SDTM) standards have been approved for some time.  And analysis standards (ADaM) are in progress.   With these data standards in place,  the transition between associated business processes should become, to overuse the phrase,  standard as well.
 
Has industry reached the end of this journey successfully?  Of course not.   But we’ve done well along several segments of the trip.    As we’ve moved from ‘what’ to ‘when’, the next question we need to be asking is ‘what next?’.

Tired of trying to tie data together with the electronic equivalent of bailing wire?  A blog post this week contained what I think is some great news for those interested in standards and interoperability.

I have been a follower of John Halamka, CIO at Harvard Medical School, for a number of years.  My first exposure to him was a story that appeared in CIO magazine back in early 2003 related to a major IT failure at Beth Israel over which he presided.  The article was as refreshing as it was informative – a senior executive standing up and openly talking about a problem that happened on his watch.  How often do we see industry executives “spinning” problems instead of letting a high-profile magazine describe it in all the gory details.  John’s spin: “"I made a mistake.” Awesome.

Among his many duties, Dr. Halamka is chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP).  For those that may not recognize that group (and if you don't, you need to), it is an organization focusing on health system interoperability, and has been a significant driver behind national standards development supporting healthcare information exchange.  In my world, there are really 5 sets of standards I care about: IT standards (e.g., W3C, WS-I), CDISC, HL7, HIPAA, and HITSP.