Archive for November, 2009
Lethal Lag Time: Concerns, Possible Solutions
November 24, 2009
In a follow up from yesterday’s post, I came across an article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on a drug funding issue force one of the major cooperative oncology groups to modify how they approach clinical trials. The article, titled,
“Costly Cancer Drugs Trigger Proposals To Modify Clinical Trial Design” notes a new drug costing up to $9000 per month per patient. In doing the economic analysis using formulas like Quality Adjust Life Years (QALYs), the real value of these treatments is being questioned.
On the brighter side, two potential solutions to long lag times for research are a search tool and a predictive modeling tool.
- explorys is a new spin off from the Cleveland Clinic which “enables users to collaborate, search, and tag meaningful correlations from treatments and outcomes within patient populations while maintaining security and privacy.” Hoping to get a demo soon.
- Archimedes Model which is reviewed recently in Business Week
and in Wired Magazine this month. which is a predictive modeling tool which is a full-scale simulation model of human physiology, diseases, behaviors, interventions, and healthcare systems.
Lethal Lag Time: Defining and Advocating
November 24, 2009
Lethal Lag Time is described in the in the e-Patient While Paper (page 87) in the context of bypassing the lag time by using patient-initiated research. But are there other ways to accelerate traditional clinical trials or provide other alternatives to answer research questions. A search of the term “clinical trial failures” yields only 7 results on Pubmed. Clinical trial recruitment yields on 29 results. Don’t we need more study of research to understand some of the problems in clinical trials, such as, failures and recruitment problems? Are there ways to examine each phase – protocol development, funding, recruitment, even publication etc.? The Obama administration is providing some DOD grants which are simple application processes and rapid decision cycles. Why can’t a similar program be applied to medical research grants?
Finally, is there a way to inject the urgency of a term like Lethal Lag Time into the medical research discussion including the professional literature? Not sure how we can do this but Participatory Medicine and e-Patient involvement are key. Watch for more blog posts on this topic.
Enterprise 2.0 – Limits of Social Media in the Organization
November 13, 2009
Earlier this week I presented on a social media panel at the NEOSA CIO Symposium in Cleveland. Slides below and bookmarks here. I was surprised at how many companies block social media from their employees (about 50% from an informal poll). After the panel, I think many were going to take a second look at social media as both a customer engagement tactic and/or a internal tool set for employee collaboration and communication.
Some related blog posts on this topic include:
- The Über-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 from Harvard Business Review
- Let’s Move Away From Social Media and Get Down to Business – from ReadWriteWeb
which argues for a pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 which will:- Address key business concerns
- Demonstrate business value
- Acquire social computing competency
Enterprise 2.0 is a work in progress. I hope we will see more articles/blogs on ROI and general benefits of Enterprise 2.0, particularly in health care organizations.
Interview for Significant Science
November 6, 2009
Having met Hope Leman at Medicine 2.0, I was impressed with her Scan Grants website. Hope asked me for an interview for her new blog Significant Science. Who could refuse to be a part of significant science.
The interview appeared today. It made me think about how my thinking about the web has evolved from early websites in the 1990s through more interactive web applications to this age of social media. Social media in health care is evolving quickly as more join the experience and some push the envelope.
