MedIntelliBlog™

This afternoon CDW and Ziff Enterprize teamed-up in a webinar to discuss the direction that data storage IT infrastructure is heading.

Chuck Brinkley IBM Storage Specialist at CDW shared his insights about the drivers of storage systems purchases. Trends statistics were at times predictable but most often surprising. Share this at your next wine and cheese social:

• By 2020 globally we will be well over 25 zeta-bytes of data world wide – Wow!

So what does a zeta-byte look like? (comparison chart to be published next week.)

For business, Brinkley goes on to say that when it comes to the need for storage capacity the main drivers vary by size of company out of 11 possible drivers:

• Large companies (>1,000 employees) the drivers are:

1. “Need for new capacity”
2. “Better virtualization capabilities”
3. Tied – “Better backup/recovery” and “Greater scalability”

• Medium-sized companies (100 -999 employees) drivers include:

1. “Need for new capacity”
2. “Better backup/recovery”
3. “Better virtualization capabilities”

• Small companies (<100 employees) drivers include:

1. “Need for new capacity”
2. “Better performance / reliability”
3. “Better backup/recovery”

Virtualization or online storage “cloud computing” comes into play as companies grow beyond 100 employees – A critical consideration as you grow your business.

Virtualization is now one of the top 2 to 3 drivers for larger corporations when making content management decisions – essentially non-existent five years ago.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Subscribe to “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News”

Medical life sciences industry intelligence is widely scattered and tough to track. Keep up to date with “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News on MedIntelliBlog – simply access and/or subscribe to the 25-story feed by visiting:

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Current News “Top Picks” by MIB Editors…

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Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Subscribe to “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News”

No man is an island. Neither is his medical record file.

To practice intelligent medicine and advance medical technology discovery and development, the power of consolidated medical data needs to be harnessed.

Clinical trials are not the only source of scientific discovery. Retrospective analysis of site-specific procedural and product use and consumption metrics reveal essential medical professional decision and use insights without violating the individual’s personal medical records, satisfying HIPPA and other regulations. And the later source of data can do so in a much more cost effective manner using current bar coding technologies and data entry, securely and selectively accessing remote hospital databanks. Since medical records for patient cohorts would be pulled as consolidated groups, no one person’s medical records would be inappropriately revealed.

But all has to operate in a virtual space to be fully accessible and must be fully compatible to be most effective. And what better way than through cloud computing where content management meets essential applications?

Ask yourself, “In this extremely tough economy, how will my company cost effectively manage its own content-rich databases of retrospective data to improve our decision-making capabilities?”

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko
Senior Editor

If anyone has had a physician hand personal diagnostic films over for safe keeping it may stir thought about the future of  medical data storage.

The increasingly urgent need to manage the growing number of petabytes of diagnostic data is driving development of a new breed of personalized medicine.

Consider for example the recent WeirdMedical post from June 4 ["Weird New Advances in Ancient Device Material"]. The article gives you a glimpse into the future of how medical practitioners and industry may be able to gather and report on personal medical intelligence about a patient. According to Technology Review’s “10 Emerging Technologies 2010” or “TR10″ published by MIT in the article “Implantable Electronics,”

“Tufts University biomedical engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto is using silk as the basis for implantable optical and electronic devices that will act like a combination vital-sign monitor, blood test, imaging center, and pharmacy–and will safely break down when no longer needed.”

Further consider, this additional diagnostic data needs to be managed. We need to ask who will keep up with capturing and storing additional streams of data from this and other new sources in addition to those from current sources. We can barely manage now. As updated patient progress reports are produced, patient records transcribers, data entry techs, auto bar code readers, etc., will not be able to keep up. Data flow will be too rapid and voluminous.

We need intelligent capturing, recording and storing solutions for accurate retrieval   To be discussed next posting…is “intelligent cloud computing” the solution?

Let us help you master your business and competitor intelligence content management.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko
Senior Editor

Intelligence on our life sciences industry is widely scattered and tough to track. Keep up to date with “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News on MedIntelliBlog. You can access and/or subscribe to the 25-story feed by visiting:

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Current News “Top Picks” by MIB Editors…

Some health insurance rates are skyrocketing
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New Health Affairs Issue: Implementing Health Reform
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Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Subscribe to “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News

The recent article in The Economist published February 27, cited previously in this blog on March 10, examines how “The data deluge*,” information overload, however you refer to it, will lead to our demise.

One critical issue is available storage and reliable access. According to the publication and IDC, information created now exceeds available storage by 50%. However, in a mere 1 1/2 years from now information created estimated at 1,750 exabytes will exceed storage by over 100%! Where will that leave us in 2012? 2015? 2020?

For your company, can you honestly answer that you, your CIO and IT team will be ready to manage this exponential growth in volume projected by 2011? Best to establish a plan for a scalable content management structure now.

Let us help you master your business and competitor intelligence content management.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko
Senior Editor

* To read more about this subject visit The Economist editorial page, “The data deluge,” and associated feature article. “Data, data everywhere,” in the February 27, 2010 issue at the The Economist online.

Let’s applaud Gienna Shaw at HealthLeaders Media for insight into a new intelligence that presently dismissive patient care maps miss.

Gienna’s article, “Ready or Not, Tech-Savvy e-Patients are Coming,” shares a glimpse of how simple doctor-patient communications can be. It’s observations are simple – doctors can use “e-information exchange” via emails and patient-centric educational websites with databases storing critically key articles to patient education…amazing simple yet profoundly incomprehensible in today’s paper-intensive healthcare system. And it’s exactly like we use in our daily business and personal lives? Yes, exactly.

There’s a critical  message here – intelligent patient care is most cost-effective when it is direct and easy to use.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Intelligence on economic issues critical to our life sciences industry is widely scattered and tough to track. Keep up to date with “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News on MedIntelliBlog. You can access and/or subscribe to the 25-story feed by visiting:

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Current News “Top Picks” by MIB Editors…

AstraZeneca Case Rewards Repeat Whistleblowers With $45 Million
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Stay alert, be intelligent -

Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Subscribe to “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News

Intelligence on economic issues pertinent to our life sciences industry is widely scattered and tough to track. Keep up to date with “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News. The second Wednesday of each month, we will post this Breaking News on MedIntelliBlog. You can also access it as a feed and/or subscribe to it by visiting its:

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See what your fellow readers voted the “Top 4 Most Read” News Articles of Last Week:

RMG Networks Extends into Pharmacies with Acquisition
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DNA Medicine Institute Awarded NIH Grant for Emergency Point-of-Care Blood Sensor
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Stay alert, be intelligent -

Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

Subscribe to “Economic Issues in U.S. Healthcare” Breaking News

As with our life sciences industry, any industry that relies on technology to diagnose, mitigate or solve a problem, needs to take a strategic view of how that technology is applied and managed.

Applying the technology to the problem is typically the job of senior applications and design engineers. Extending its application to making it manufacturable is the responsibility of the senior manufacturing engineers.

But managing the technology can be assigned to any number of functional managers from engineering to marketing to business development to senior management.

No matter who assumes the role, your management team needs to be well-informed with intelligence. And not just commercial or industry intelligence but technology application intelligence. In our life sciences industry, this technology as applied to the problem is considered a clinical or medical application.

So whose responsibility is it to track clinical competitive intelligence to make strategic business decisions? Clinical research? Marketing communications? Business development? Competitive intelligence? Let’s propose a hybrid between clinical research and marketing to create “Clinical Marketing.”

Clinical marketing does not manage the daily marketing communications, marketing messaging or sales support roles.  Clinical marketing (CM) guides the clinical research team and reports to senior management, closely tracking competitor activity, clinical research results,  new physician practice patterns, off label uses, and more to understand the market and strategically layout the course organization will follow. CM also keeps a close eye on clinical research results, medical findings and technology developments to interpret and broadcast their potential impact to prevent your company from being caught by surprise enabling it to surpass the competition.

Assign a new function, that of clinical marketing to keep your management team alert, knowledgeable and insightful, giving your company the market advantage.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko

Senior Editor