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Archive for the ‘Clinical tools’ Category

Medical Research, Bloomberg-Style

• Posted May 2nd 2008
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• by Janice

Many of you are probably familiar with the Bloomberg terminals that transformed the workflow for financial traders and analysts in the 1980’s.  The Bloomberg system integrates financial information feeds in a manner that allows analysts and traders to monitor real-time events in the context of historical trends-and to place trades.  Because of its value as a productivity and decision-support tool, Bloomberg has become an essential part of the daily routine for a large percentage of traders. 

At the Bio-IT World conference in Boston this week, Gary Kennedy, CEO of RemedyMD, said that his goal is become the Bloomberg for medical researchers, and the analogy is certainly apt for the relational database system that RemedyMD has developed with the Cleveland Clinic.  Their product, Investigate, is attempting the very difficult task of tying together many sources of data in a way that allows the researchers to clearly see interactions between drug data, medical literature, evidence-based decision tools and internal clinical data.

RemedyMD takes care of the laborious task of data management and provides a dashboard interface that facilitates analysis and collaboration. The goal: helping researchers spend more time on analysis and less time on data collection, conversion, and reporting.  This young company, started by ex-Oracle developers, clearly has larger ambitions, with its growing suite of applications for physicians, surgeons, and dieticians, as well as general office electronic health record (EHR) productivity tools. This is classic Infocommerce in action, and we’re putting RemedyMD on our Model of Excellence watch list. This is a company that bears watching…

 

Medical Reality Shows for the Pros

• Posted April 23rd 2008
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• by Janice

I just took a look at the recently enhanced Procedures Consult, one of the online clinical reference products in Elsevier’s Consult line.  Procedures Consult builds on some of Elsevier’s medical reference texts and is supplemented with custom—produced animations and video content that enhance the textual and still-image content.

The videos offer step by step demonstrations on real patients of how to perform certain procedures, such as defibrillation or shoulder arthroscopy (the number of procedures continues to grow). Procedures Consult includes online testing that reinforces the understanding of the anesthesia, emergency medicine, orthopaedic and internal medicine procedures that are included in the reference tool.

This is a case where the addition of video content adds obvious value to the reference content, compared to some products where the video element consists of nothing more than talking heads. Even an amateur can appreciate how useful the video content will be to physicians and medical students who need to study new procedures or refresh their knowledge of infrequently used procedures.

Procedures Consult may not capture the imagination of the consumer-focused investment firms eager to pounce on ad-supported consumer-centric online health products, but it represents an intelligent application of technology that greatly enhances the value of information to the audience it serves. Furthermore, by virtue of highlighting industry-standard patient safety guidelines within the product, Procedures Consult becomes an important tool in the performance improvement efforts of hospitals. Performance improvement may not sound leading edge and exciting, but it represents real dollars to health care provider institutions and better outcomes for patients.

 

Epocrates Files for IPO

• Posted April 18th 2008
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• by Janice

Epocrates, best known for its mobile clinical information decision support tools for medical professionals, filed a registration statement with the SEC yesterday.  The filing didn’t disclose terms, but it estimates that the company will raise at least $75 million in the offering.  Revenues for 2007 were $65.6 million, which represents a 33% increase over 2006.  However, elsewhere in the filing the company reports that growth in  subscriptions to US physicians was flat in the period.

Subscription sales to physicians and other healthcare professionals do not represent the only revenue stream for Epocrates.  They also provide “interactive information services” to pharmaceutical and managed care companies and offer physician panels to market research companies.  These additional sources of revenue allow Epocrates to provide free access to core drug reference and decision support databases, which helps them build loyalty among their user base. 

Epocrates has been in the news recently for creating iPhone-compatible versions of  its drug and clinical information products.  This development should help Epocrates maintain its cool factor among medical students and younger healthcare professionals. 

In a related development, news that UpToDate, a competitor to Epocrates, is on the market has been circulating.  We’ll fill in more details in an upcoming post.

 

Technology + Content Is a Winning Formula

• Posted February 12th 2008
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• by Janice

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, highlighted five trends in the information industry at last month’s SIIA IIS conference in New York. Among the five, he stated that “software and information are most powerful together”.

That’s the mantra InfoCommerce Group has been promoting for years, and one which by now should be obvious to anyone who has been using computers for decades to analyze data and search for content in online networks. There have been great advances in using technology to enhance value of textual data through wider use of taxonomies, automated entity extraction utilities, and search engines and ranking systems that rely on the underlying technology to improve the search experience for the user. More recently, we’re seeing wider-spread integration of content into the business process or work routine of professionals to increase their productivity and quality of their output.

With data and textual content under control, one of the next innovations will be in enhancing the value of image and video content. Wolters Kluwer’s recent investment in Logical Images, a digital imaging company that has applied taxonomies to their collection of images in their VisualDx system to allow searches to be carried out by descriptions of symptoms, not just by disease or condition, offers an example. The combination of searchable clinical content from Wolters Kluwer and searchable images from Logical Images creates what the press release calls an “easy online clinical decision support system”. 

According to the press release, “Together, Clin-eguide and VisualDx provide an unmatched clinical decision solution. We avoid using the term “solutions” to describe combinations of content and technology since the combined offering is rarely a standalone solution. But there is no doubt that improved productivity does result from the appropriate application of knowledge management principles and software to information, whether it be data, textual content, sound, images or video content. And, now that process improvement through IT is the mantra of the healthcare industry, we look forward to many more alliances between software companies and publishers that want to produce a winning formula for healthcare professionals by combining technology + content.