SalesForce.com partner introduces CRM for clinical trial management on Force Platform

Had an interesting chat with the CEO of the US based IT service provider for clinical research industry in June. Apparently the company a SalesForce.com partner introduces new CTMS application in India. Just came to know that they are going commercial this month. The applications is aimed at clinical trial management, Study site management and Patient Recruitment in the clinical research industry . Aimed at CROs, Hospitals, University Research centers and clinical trial Study Sites.

The application is based on Force platform by SalesForce and already have few Indian Organization using it for several months. The product will be offered in SaaS/Hosted/Cloud versions, which will render affordable TCO and higher ROI with less or no Capital investmental.

GE Healthcare announces SaaS Electronic Medical Records Management

http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com/

GE Health Care is rolling out a new, cloud-based platform that makes it easier for physicians with small practices to maintain and keep track of the electronic medical records of their patients. The new SAAS offering is part of GE’s Centricity offering.

Introducing Centricity Advance
Colonnades Family Medicine is running on Centricity Advance, a web-based EMR solution launched today by GE Healthcare and specifically designed for the smaller physician practice.

Unlike most clinical and financial management solutions, Centricity Advance is a web-based service that costs less than a standard client-server software deployment and is maintained and supported with little or no strain on the healthcare provider’s resources, freeing up more time for patient care.

Ideal as a Web-Based Service
The fact that Centricity Advance was designed from the ground up as a web service is significant. Instead of simply providing web-based gateway into a standard EMR application, the Centricity Advance is created with anywhere/anytime access in mind, resulting in an intuitive and efficient interface without sacrificing functionality. Since system management is centralized as part of the Centricity Advance service, small practices don’t have to worry about data protection, updates, equipment failures and other typically stressful responsibilities of user-driven IT management.

Another key feature of Centricity Advance is the Patient Self-Service Portal, which connects patients to their care. By using their own secure password to log in, patients can communicate privately with their doctor and view their own information such as statements, prescriptions and lab results. Patients can also request and confirm appointments, request prescription refills and get automatic reminders for immunizations and lab tests.

Grid computing projects supported by Big Blue announced significant progress in looking for new potential drugs in cancer treatment

http://www.cioupdate.com/features/article.php/3888281/IBM-Volunteers-Help-Locate-Anti-Cancer-Drugs.htm

New Momentum Teams with Oracle to Help Reduce Counterfeiting in the Life Sciences Industry

New Momentum, a leading provider of SaaS‐based anti‐counterfeiting and channel integrity solutions, is working with Oracle to help pharmaceutical companies combat the escalating problem of counterfeit drugs and meet new regulatory compliance requirements.

According to the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, worldwide pharmaceutical counterfeits are expected to increase by 13% annually nearly twice the pace of legitimate drugs. This means that counterfeit drugs could become a $75B industry by 2010. As these bad drugs flood the market, patient wellness is at risk and so are manufacturers’ revenues and brand reputation. This growing counterfeit problem, combined with the expected federal regulations for serialized drug products and electronic pedigrees, creates significant challenges for pharmaceutical companies.

New Momentum’s CEO, Stuart Clifton, commented, “The best way to meet these challenges is to incorporate internal enterprise and supply chain data with external data on counterfeit suspects and activity. That’s why we’re working closely with Oracle’s Life Sciences team to provide the first solution to offer pharmaceutical companies the ability to track units through the supply chain as well as quickly identify and find counterfeits.”
Oracle is focusing on helping manufacturers with a total solution that includes the ability to serialize each sellable unit and then track that unit through the supply chain via electronic pedigree. By integrating its 24/7 real‐time view of counterfeit suspects, New Momentum expects to help pharmaceutical customers be proactive in their anti‐counterfeiting efforts and comply with serialization and pedigree mandates. Prototypes of this solution will be demonstrated at Oracle OpenWorld, New Momentum Booth #2619A and Oracle Booth #S‐082 from October 11‐15 in San Francisco.

SAS Does SAAS- Clinical Trials on Cloud

SAS Drug Development—is now available in an online mode. SAS hosts the program, and users log on via the internet. SAS’s goal is to have customers up and running on the system in a month.

SAS® Solutions OnDemand: Drug Development is a hosted solution for aggregating, analyzing and reviewing clinical trials data in order to determine safety and efficacy outcomes. It includes a compliance-enabling platform for efficiently developing, executing and managing the collection, sharing, transformation, analysis and submission of clinical research data.

press release

SaaS and Healthcare Internet Business Models

SaaS is a great technical model that can save money, increase efficiency, scale-up fast etc etc. But is it a viable business methodology?. Does it make money for the owner who offer this service. according CEOs of many traditional software companies like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft SaaS doesn’t make money meaning big margins and huge profits. Even though all these companies do have their own SaaS applications and strategy in place.

Health care and Medical practice on the other hand is a different place. And that is what Ravi Sohal, CEO of remakinghealthcare.com thinks based on his own experience Healthcare Internet Business Models Don’t Scale that easily. And I think his argument is spot on
While I agree to his arguments there are many software suppliers that services only healthcare and medical markets for exmaple Pharmacy One source which claims to be Healthcare’s #1 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider. And yes its true that most of all such successful companies fall into one catagory- software vendors allbeit slightly different to the traditional ones

3G Doctor

I am working on the topic (software as a service) SaaS applications in Medical and Healthcare field, so the next few months my focus there.

So this week I like to post about 3GDoctor.com a service that allows you to video consult with General Medical Council registered Doctors using a 3G Video Mobile. When you register as a patient with 3G Doctor you can also use it to create, store and manage your Personal Health Record which can be referred to by your Doctor during video consultations. Yummy now that feels like the next google acqusition target.

Mediserve is another company that is now planning to came up with SaaS model of their applications.

And of course have to talk about Microsoft , even though I work for Oracle andicrosoft is competition.

Digipede is developing on microsofts .net plafrom to help anyone providing SaaS on the Microsoft platform. And they claim to have a bioinformatics company testing their application to develop bioinformatics application in SaaS model And it lok like that customer is The Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) as a part of the Novartis Research Foundation, details of the case study on Digipede website

And yes I ahve written about  GeneBio earlier their claims to have PhenyxOnline as the first commercial platform in the proteomics field offered in a SaaS model    

Also came across this intersting post by Paweł Szczęsny.  Thinking about RaaS: Research-as-a-Service

Biology of Cloud Computing

The world summit on Cloud Computing is on December 1-2/2008. Surprisingly Bioinformatics is mentioned only once . And only by cycle computing a company offering grid computing solutions. That apart there is no talk about lifescience space. Ofcourse cloud computing is buzz word for now, and will remain so for some time. It might event meet the same fate of bioinformatics industry has faced in initial years. But this time around there are amny Enterprise companies backing the concept, catiously though. From Amazon, Microsoft, Google, to Sun

But according to according to research firm IDC the current economic crisis in the US may save IT companies that invest in cloud computing, as it will contribute to significant growth in that sector over the next five years.

ofcourse there are concerns around data privacy and data security But  Companies like Millenium Pharma re investing in technology provided by companies like WorkDay (SaaS HR started by former Peoplesoft founder). Earlier this year google announded that Genentech would use Google Apps

While Cloud computing for scientist stil have wait, unless you are working in CERN or other research centre on high computing projects, after all they invented Grid Computing or atleast made the fiest steps