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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.