MedIntelliBlog™

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

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.