MedIntelliBlog™

At the annual Life Sciences Alley meeting held in Minneapolis (December 8, 2010), presenters dissected the economic benefit of new medical innovations to our global society. It was an eye-opening discussion trained on the theoretical best methods to capture new innovations’ relative and absolute economic value.

Presenters from most sectors of our industry – manufacturers, healthcare providers and government – were pressing on the core theme — the need for a centralized system to act as a dynamic repository for capturing the economic value of therapies and diagnostic modalities, as well as their procedures, throughout the life-course of patient’s care to assess the true economic value to our healthcare system.

In the U.S. they call this “Comparative Effectiveness Research” (“CER”); in the EU they call it “Health Technology Effectiveness” (“HTE”). No matter what it is called, this grassroots movement is slowly evolving us to a new breed of clinical trial protocols capturing not only safety and efficacy/effectiveness but also economic value and comparing that value with that of the “gold standards” of care at any point in time.

What was not presented was what agency or group that would take the responsibility to fund and create the central data repository. There was a large minority agreeing that in the U.S. it will need to be a centralized service, similar to ClinicalTrials.gov…and it would likely cost billions of dollars to develop, commercialize and manage.

But where does that leave the developer and manufacturers of our new medical innovations? I am convinced that manufacturers need to act now and on a smaller scale. Each company will need to establish its own data management system (DMS) that is easy to use and compatible with the newly evolving central system, allowing as seamless uploads to this planned national central repository as possible.

Your comments?

Next week…likely solutions for practical DMS.

Stay alert, be intelligent -

Victoria Hunsicker Sanko – Senior Editor

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Jordan Zornes – Editor & Senior Analyst

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”