MedIntelliBlog™

This week in Seattle at the Washington Biotech and Biomedical Association (WBBA) Innovation Northwest 2010 conference, the organizers convened an outstanding panel of three of the remaining top life science reporters in the region. These highly respected business and industry reporters included Kristi Heim from the last remaining regional newspaper, the Seattle Times; Keith Seinfeld from one of the local National Public Radio (NPR) stations, KPLU; and Luke Timmerman from the newly emerging online biotech and tech source, Xconomy. All three agreed that with the wrenchingly painful slow demise of the print newspaper industry, the meat and bone of their news industry is nearing extinction. With evaporating operating budgets from loss of large advertisers and classified ads, newspapers’ staffs are shrinking. Along with them go our diamonds – investigative reporters. And along with them goes our collective “informed state,” our intelligence as a nation.

This disruptive force is epidemic across the U.S. It’s scary but excitingly new.

At the same time new sources of news and information are exploding around us. The Economist* calls news and information “data.” But with no standards to manage that data, delivering it in one or two formats, or to editorialize to give that data a frame of reference, we are inundated. Bombardment comes from the relatively new – emails, feeds, twitters, online social and professional networking sites, cells, text messages – and the old – newspapers, magazines, TV, radio. The list goes on.

What do we do about it nationally? There are many business models being developed by those who are better informed on comprehensive news investigation and delivery than I.

In the biotech and medtech industries, we can do much to take responsibility for keeping ourselves informed about medical advances and medical industry news. To remain intelligent ourselves we must be “plugged-in,” informed. The key is to do so without becoming overwhelmed with data or worse, sound bites.

Just as our pharmaceutical and biotech industries portend the rise of “personalized medicine,” so should each of us now pursue “personalized news” or “personalized intelligence.” This conscious management of our information sources is essential to making timely, wise decisions in our medical business sectors. We as senior managers cannot afford to miss critical “nuggets” or “diamonds” of information or to waste our team’s time digging for them. Our sources need to be laser sharp and precise, eliminating extraneous distractions. These sources need to be intelligently selected tools that effectively integrate into one or at most two of our communications devices to best serve our needs.

Start simply, intelligently. In marketing stats or math classes when you used multi-variant analysis you introduced or changed one variable at a time. You did not know what variable affected a precise outcome until you changed just that one variable. This is the same with your sources of information. With your device of choice in hand, it’s time to move onto selecting medical intelligence source as tools to equip your intelligence toolkit. We’ll start those first steps later this month.

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 Economist online.