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Archive for the ‘Medical Research’ Category

Monetizing Online Health Communities

• Posted May 16th 2008
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• by Janice

 My colleague, Russell Perkins, writes this week about how a partnership between Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) and iGuard.org is selling access to the information collected in patient community sites to investors, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare industry stakeholders.   

Sermo, one of the participants in our Health Content07 conference last fall, is now providing paid access to market researchers in the medical field who want to poll Sermo’s communities of experts.    

The Wall St. Journal reported earlier this week about another company, EmergingMed, that is leveraging its online patient communities by playing matchmaker between existing patient community sites and the medical research teams that are seeking recruits to test cutting-edge treatments in clinical trials.  According to the WSJ article, one survey by Harris Interactive revealed that 75% of cancer patients would have been willing to enroll in a relevant clinical trial “had they known it was possible”. 

These are all great examples of market-driven information products and show how social networking sites can broaden their revenue base beyond online advertising.

 

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…