Should pharma Companies avoid Mobile apps? and DigitalHealth

Its easier to say current mobile app model is broken, but at same time they still offer advantages atleast in the first few years when a drug enter the market. But the truth is these apps seldom becomes useful for the larger audience.

Study among 1814 physicians in 25 specialties shows often pharmaceutical sales reps show medical information that physicians have seen already through other digital and non-digital channels, and most often those digital channels and content are often not even created by pharma companies

Thats because current Pharma Digital projects often run in isolation to a range of existing patient/physician outreach channels, including: e-mail marketing, rep-triggered emails, web-events (webcasts, of conferences and meetings), videos, self-guided e-detailing, remote detailing, product websites, treatment and diagnostic tools (apps), training courses (CME)

Most pharma companies already uses a central system to manage their websites but nothing of similar nature exists for other digital channels especially the mobile apps. The early concepts of “Digital Factory” where confined to merely outsourcing resources involved in infrastructure and content development to a single IT/BPO vendor. The mobile app Factory need to become essential part of the Digital Pharma 2.0 changes.

Most of the DigitalHealth apps have failed or have seen usage metrics going down after initial hype. Most #digitalhealth apps and #startups fail after initial success because, while we cherish our health we hate being reminded about our sickness.

Read the rest of the Original article at Linkedin 

France to invest €670 million euros for Genomics and Personalized Medicine

Government of France Announce plans to invest €670 million euros or ($760.8 million) for Genomics and Personalized Medicine which will see it establish 12 genome sequencing centers and two national centers for genomic expertise and data analysis. The program would initially focus on cancer, diabetes and rare diseases but after 2020 would expand to include common diseases.

This investment by France follows the release on Wednesday of a report by medical experts examining the possibility of France widening access to genetic medicine within 10 years. A key objective in the report for the first 10 years of the programme is to prepare for the integration of genomic medicine into the normal course of patient care in the country, which means sequencing about 235,000 genomes per year by 2020.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine said Investment in the five year initiative will also come from industry. He also expected Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are interested in the growing genomic medicine sector

Several European countries have already begun to integrate genomic medicine into their health systems and there are large scale genomic initiatives in the UK, US and China. China has even recently announced a Precision Medicine Cloud

 

 

Novartis, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly partner for new clinical trial software platform

57% Americans would be interested in participating in a clinical trial. However, most clinical studies struggles to recruit sufficient patients. The issue has attracted a number or software as well contract service firms that specialize in clinical trial recruitment, even using social medial tools. Then there is long going debate and efforts for integrating EHR data into clinical trial and identifying potential suitable target population of patients directly from de-identified EHR data

In order to connect patients and researchers, Novartis, Pfizer and Eli Lilly and Company, are partnering in the U.S. to provide a new platform to improve access to information about clinical trials. The platform will enhance clinicaltrials.gov and is expected to be launched by early 2014 with a database of about 50 clinical research studies from the participating companies.

The new platform will provide more detailed and patient-friendly information about the trials, including a machine readable “target health profile” to improve the ability of healthcare software to match individual health profiles to applicable clinical trials.

As part of the project, patients can search for trials using their own Blue Button data. To preserve data privacy de-identified Blue Button data, used only as an “index to search,” will not be stored anywhere outside of the patient’s application.

Other sponsors of clinical research studies may upload information about their trials, while software companies develop tools to deliver this information to interested patients.

India announce new formula for compensating death during clinical trials

 India has released formula to determine quantum of compensation in cases of SAEs of deaths occurring during clinical trials

The formula is available at (http://www.cdsco.nic.in/formula2013SAE.pdf)

The Guideline is available at (http://www.cdsco.nic.in/compention.pdf)

As per the new rule the compensation is calculated as

Compensation = B * F * R/99.37

Here, B = Base amount (Rounded) which is fixed as INR 800000. This base amount has been fixed with consideration of minimum wages act.

F = Factor depending on the age of the subject as per the Annexure given, which is based on Workmen Compensation Act.

R = Risk factor depending on the seriousness and severity of the disease, presence of co – morbidity and duration of disease of the subject at the time of enrolment in the clinical trial between a scale of 0.5 to 4.0 as under:
0.50 – Terminally ill patient (Expected survival not more than 6 months)
1.0 – Patient with high risk (Expected survival between 6 to 24 months)
2.0 – Patient with moderate risk (Moderate risk if not defined)
3.0 – Patient with mild risk (Mild risk is not defined)
4.0 – Healthy volunteers or subject of no risk

Here, 99.37 is the factor for age 65 in the table of worksmen compensation act. The concept used is that the base amount INR 8,00,000 should refer to the age of 65 years which corresponds to factor 99.37.

Thus, considering an example:
If the age of the subject is 30 years, the factor F as per the factor given in the table comes to 207.98
If the subject is Healthy, R = 4.0
Thus,
Compensation = 8,00,000 * 207.98 * 4.0 / 99.37 = 6,697,554/-

However, in case of patients whose expected mortality is 90% or more within 30 days, a fixed amount of INR. 200000 should be given.

If calculations are done, the compensation amounts range from Rs. 400,000 to a maximum of Rs. 7,360,000 depending on the following factors:
a) Age
b) Risk factor

The CDSCO has still not released any clarity on the calculation of compensation amount in case of clinical trial related injury (Which does not progress to death)

Content from email by: SenseCR

Processed EHR text can be used to develop CDS tools Read more: Processed EHR text can be used to develop Clinical decision support tools with automated text processing

See on Scoop.it – inPharmatics

Free text in electronic health records, with the help of natural language processing (NLP) technology, can be used to create accurate clinical decision support (CDS) tools, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

See on jamia.bmj.com

Why mHealth hasn’t created an Instagram (yet)

See on Scoop.it – inPharmatics

Read about why a Qualcomm Life executive says mobile health doesn’t yet have an Instagram, and why it eventually will.

See on www.medcitynews.com

Microsoft Lync Pilot Aids AstraZeneca Sales Rep, Researcher Collaboration – Health Care IT – News & Reviews – eWeek.com – eWeek Mobile

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

Biopharmaceutical vendor AstraZeneca has launched a unified communications pilot using Microsoft Lync to improve collaboration among pharmaceutical sales reps, doctors and researchers.
Via mobile.eweek.com

American Diabetes Association to provide millions of website users medication monitoring service using Quintiles’ Digital Patient Unit –

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

 Quintiles and the American Diabetes Association announced a strategic agreement in which Quintiles’ Digital Patient Unit will provide the Association’s millions of website users access to Quintiles’ medication monitoring service.

 

The Association’s constituents who opt in for the service will receive free safety checks of their medications to identify potential interactions and other risk factors, which are already provided to the 2.5 million registered users of Quintiles’ www.MediGuard.org. Registrants will also be eligible to participate in select direct-to-patient programs to benefit their medical conditions and advance global diabetes patient care.

 

The Association’s constituents may opt in to this service from the Association’s website www.Diabetes.org

Via www.quintiles.com

Oracle acquire cloud based clinical operations and analytics vendor ClearTrial

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

On March 29, 2012, Oracle announced that it has agreed to acquire ClearTrial, a leading provider of cloud-based Clinical Trial Operations and analytics products that make the planning, sourcing, and tracking of clinical projects and financial performance…

Via www.oracle.com

Can “Clinical Data Integration on the Cloud” be a reality?

 

The story I am about to tell is almost 8 years old. I was managing software services delivery for a global pharmaceutical company from India. This was a very strategic account and the breadth of services covered diverse systems and geographies. It is very common that staff from the customer organization visit our delivery centers (offsite locations) to perform process audits, governance reviews and to meet people in their extended organizations.

During one such visit a senior executive noticed that two of my colleagues, sitting next to each other, supported their system (two different implementations of the same software) across two different geographies. They happened to have the name of the systems they support, pinned to a board at their desks. The executive wanted us to take a picture of the two cubicles and email to him. We were quite surprised at the request. Before moving on to speak to other people he asked a couple of questions and realized the guys were sharing each other’s experiences and leveraging the lessons learnt from one deployment for the other geography.  It turned out that this does not happen in their organization, in fact their internal teams hardly communicate as they are part of different business units and geographies

Read full article on at inPharmatics

Predictive Analytics for Patient Adherence

The New Medicine Service (NMS) offered by Engalnd’s  NHS community pharmacies came into effect since 1st October 2011. NMS is a patient adherene service and focuses on patients with long term conditions that have been prescribed new medicines.

It is hoped that NMS will lead to the following outcomes:

• improve medicines adherence
• increase patient engagement with their condition and medicines, which will support them in making decisions about their treatment and self management
• reduce medicines wastage
• reduce hospital admissions due to adverse events associated with medicines
• increase reporting of medicine adverse reactions by pharmacists and patients
• positive patient assessments
• provide evidence base on the effectiveness of the service
• enable the development of outcome and/or quality measures for community pharmacy

But the Service since launch has seen severe criticism from pharmacists’ over several issues, especially how the pharmacist is re-imbursed for the providing the service which also involved patient counselling.

The answer perhaps can be found by applying predictive analytics to identify patients who are more likely to deviate or other likely to exhibit non-compliance in adhering to the prescription.

Express Scripts has developed a set of proprietary computer models that predict, up to a year in advance, which patients are at risk of not following through on their prescribed drug therapy. details

FICO an analytics service provider also provides medication adherence ranking based on predictive analytics details

Patient Adherence Investments by Pharma Companies Current Scenario

Source: Data Sneak Peek: Groups Involved in Patient Adherence Teams

Pharma looks to mobile strategies to effectively reach prescribers | mHIMSS

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

Companies on the forward edge are putting a heavy emphasis on digital in their commercial models — but how can mobile technologies assist pharmaceutical and biotech firms in this transition?   Tablets to support the sales force – While sales forces are shrinking, they still play a vital role in educating prescribers on new medications. The pharma industry, taking the lead of companies like GSK, is starting to incent sales reps based on quality of service versus amount of sales (read more here in the WSJ). One of the tools that is helping deliver better service is the tablet. Reps with an iPad can deliver more interactive and engaging product information, capture signatures for compliance and make the most of a few quick minutes with a doctor in the time it would take a laptop to boot up.   Online and mobile drug sampling programs – Companies now have the ability to leverage PDMA-compliant mobile apps and websites that allow physicians to request free product samples that they can distribute to their patients to gauge efficacy and assist with adherence. Because the Internet never sleeps, physicians can do this no matter what shifts they are working, independent of time zone or location, 24 hours a day.   Direct-to-HCP mobile advertising – It used to be that most online and mobile advertisements for drugs were placed only in industry magazines, blogs and online communities geared toward healthcare professionals and general consumer websites. We see this changing, with emergence of mobile networks focused on healthcare such as Tomorrow Networks, which is comprised of more than 50 medical apps. Pharma companies can now buy ad placements in mobile apps made exclusively for physicians and other healthcare professionals. A physician can be looking up treatment information at the point of care and see an ad for a medication that is relevant to their patient’s ailment. That’s incredibly powerful for the physician and advantageous for the advertiser.   mDetails – Physicians want to learn about the best drugs and treatments for their patients. mDetails are multimedia mobile product presentations that provide information about drugs in a way that allows physicians to absorb detailed information at their own pace — and in their own time. Because mDetails are distributed on smartphones – it lets physicians fit pharma product education into ‘found time’ at any point during their day that’s convenient for them.   By employing a multi-channel approach and by helping healthcare professionals do their jobs better instead of just selling to them, pharmaceutical companies can reach their target audiences and develop deeper value-based relationships. The aforementioned examples are just a few of the ways that pharmaceutical companies can leverage the ever-growing mobile channel; there are many more evolving every day.
Via www.mhimss.org

British Government launches Government Cloud Store with 257 Cloud Computing Suppliers

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics
UK Government launches G-Cloud store with 257 cloud computing suppliers. Offering the public sector around 1,700 cloud computing services for year-long contracts. The G-Cloud initiative, dubbed CloudStore, aims to bring a broader range of cloud computing suppliers to the government market and increase the flexibility in procurement contracts
Via www.govstore.net

privacy controlled social networking to connect patients with caregivers

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics
Privacy controlled & safe social network for Healthcare launched by Jonathan Schwartz, Ex-CEO Sun Microsystems. The networks available at http://www.carezone.com  Connects Caregivers With family members and allows health-care workers share information about aging or ill parents, spouses and children
Via www.bloomberg.com

SOCIAL CRM and its Impact on Pharmaceutical Industry

“The Banks Can Do It, Why Can’t Hospitals?”

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

In other words, computing in the banking industry is perfected, so why can’t healthcare get its act together? (Irrespective of the sea change of difference between simple financial data and incredibly complex medical data.) …
Via hcrenewal.blogspot.com

One Way to Teach Your Boss About Social Media

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

Do you want your boss to realize the full potential of social media? Yesterday on Pixels & Pills we talked about John Mack’s observation that very few senior executives attend digital pharma conferences.
Via www.pixelsandpills.com

Is Life Sciences the New Frontier for Analytics?

Via Scoop.it – inPharmatics

pharmaceuticals Researchers say pharmaceutical and other life sciences companies are ramping up their uses of analytics…
Via smartdatacollective.com

Internet on any Display Device, or internet on TV at low cost can it transform Healthcare or Clinical Research

The invention of an internet set top box has nothing to do with healthcare or  clinical trial at first look. But if HP and other companies are capable of delivering the research, then internet on any display device could change the way clinical trial is practiced at-least beginning with EDC. Yes I agree it is bit far fetched wild thought, but why not. It can also perhaps bring some transformation into patient waiting rooms in hospitals. HP’s invention along with Microsoft Kinect for PC is capable of bringing some big changes to healthcare  practice, mostly notably in TeleHealth.

If nothing else it would atleast bring internet to the masses much faster and cheaper than Android, 3G, and LTE, WiMax all put together, for the simple reason that most of the households that are capable of benefiting from the internet has access to TV as well. atleast in India

Take a look at news coverage ” HP India Research Labs brings Internet TV for the masses with the help of a TV set top box that cost less than $150″ news by Times of India

HP Labs has recently came out with what they call as “Internet TV Set Top Box for the masses” the product is called  Vayu Internet Device or VInD. HP Labs India has created the product which was reviewed by Times of India News paper. The solution enables people to receive internet content on even the most basic TV sets and manage all screen operations using basic TV remotes.

More About HP Labs Vayu Experience Platform

The HP product offers the following solutions,

Task Genie: This is a store of  apps, Yes apple has tons of them , but how many of them are useful , and several of those apps are me too products. Before anyone shouts shoot him let me tell you I have an iPhone4 loaded with 319 apps, I don’t think any one can beat that, and yet I don’t use almost 300 of them at-least once in a month, despite the fact that except one or 2 games most  other are serious apps. Yes I agree among the 300 are several apps which are me too copy cat apps which offers same function, like contact management and duplicate remover, SMS apps, chat solutions. The point is more the apps the better is not true, its the quality that matters that’s were Android fails

Web Tuner: This allows the user to create web categories, such as say News or Tech or Nature, and within each he can have the particular websites he is most interested in

Libraries: allows users to store photos, videos, music and documents in the set-top box’s hard disk. Users can tag and share them with others who have similar set-top boxes.

Contacts and Whiteboard: Users can create and store a contacts list. They can share content or have a video-conference with others who have similar set-top boxes.

Pairing with mobile phone: The set-top box can be paired with mobile phones. So, if it is paired with the user’s phone,he  can send messages to his  TV

Sensor: VInD comes with a built-in Zigbee sensor network. VInD detects the motion and sends an alert to the paired phone.

Keyboard and mouse: Vayu, which uses aLinux  operating system, can also be used as a regular PC, with a keyboard and mouse with a browser and with the TV acting as the monitor. It can be a wired or a wireless keyboard and mouse. This is were I think ViND can bring some advantage in clinical research space, every clinical trial monitoring room has  a TV

Tech Specs#: VInD has 1 GB of built-in RAM, 8GB of flash memory and the ability to add an additional 300 GB hard-disk. It comes with built-in Zigbee sensor network, USB ports, Wi-Fi, ethernet and Bluetooth 2.1 and infrared connectivity. It connects to the TV via HDMI and regular AV channel ports. It also supports GPRS, 3G and HSDPA through the use of a USB modem. It has in-built microphone and speakers and a display

Microsoft has released the Kinect for PC. It was reported that Microsoft is keen to see kinect taking an active part in Healthcare industry. Doctors are using Kinect to help stroke patients regain movement full St0ry Here. Then later there was news that Microsoft and Asus have built a laptop with Kinect motion-sensing technology.

Of-course HP is not the first to come out with this kind of  technology,

 most of the existing expensive solutions are not  comprehensive and too focused on living room with limited or no net browsing capability.

iChip Technolgies has announced their solution called @Box which claimed to bring internet to any display device including even the office projector. @Box is smaller than palm and would be sold in standard package with a key board, track ball, power adaptor and a cable to connect to the TV and would cost less than $100

iChip Technologies which was based in India was later acquired by Techfarm Ventures US-based incubator and early stage investor in technology companies. Gordon Campbell, Chief Executive Officer of Techfarm, is also the CEO and Co-founder of Personal Web (PW) Systems, a company incorporated in the US.

Techfarm Ventures had earlier invested in PortalPlayer, which went in for an IPO in 2004, and subsequently got bought out by nVIDIA in January 2007. Techfarm has earlier incubated more than a dozen companies such as the first Ethernet chip and graphics controller

Neuros Technology produces a similar product that works on Ubuntu platform called Neuros LINK, which seems to be more closer to the HP solution

Logitech and Google has released Revue a solution based on Android

Apple is talking about Apple TV for sometime

UK based Telecom operator Vodafone has launched Webbox a product that seems to draw power from Vodafones EDGE/GSM/3G network using Opera Mini Browser