Healthcare Innovations

New Tools for Finding Information

Mediapost: Healthline Networks Adds Search Tools, Content Partners - 02/13/2008. by Tameka Kee

The new search functionality, called Healthline Drug Search, aims to help users better manage their medications, prevent harmful drug interactions and research alternatives. A tool called Interaction Checker lists all possible negative interactions, from other drugs and supplements, to herbs and foods, while Pill Finder lets a consumer enter info about a drug (like color, shape and visible markings) to identify what type of medication it is. There's also an image gallery with drug photos as well as a drug facts FAQ. Healthline also embedded more than 170 applications into the site such as a BMI calculator, a breast cancer risk assessment, as well as quizzes on topics like managing diabetes.

Industry Restructuring

Boston Business Journal: Drug development partnerships, outsourcing, inevitable in future. 2008-Feb-5, no byline

"Increasingly, R & D productivity gains will depend on developers focusing on what they contribute best to the drug development value chain and partnering with organizations that provide capabilities that are too expensive to develop or maintain internally, or are outside of the company's core competencies," Kenneth Kaitin, director of the Tufts CSDD, said.

Information has a Social Life

This article reminds me of the book The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, which is about innovation in Silicon Valley being driven by engineers job-hopping or just hanging out together.

The Scientist: Telling Science's Stories. by Stephen Wiley (Vol 22, Issue 1)

For most of biology, however, oral communication is the dominant way to transmit knowledge, with unappreciated side effects. It is well known that the best way to make rapid progress in a field is to have a big laboratory with many postdocs. Besides the advantage of having a large pool of relatively cheap labor, there is a huge advantage to being able to share and discuss relevant information with a large group working in the same area of research. Achieving a "critical mass" of investigators working and talking in a laboratory is essential for achieving rapid progress in a complex new area of research. Small scientific conferences, too, can be an exceedingly useful way to learn a new area of research or catch up on current happenings in your own field, all via oral communication.

Building Researcher Profiles

To take the public information already out there and rearrange it so that scientists can easily hunt for collaborators...that's innovation.

Bio-IT World: Collexis Creates a ‘MySpace’ for Scientists. 2008-Jan-28, by Catherine Varmazis

Launched this month by Collexis, a developer of high-definition search and knowledge discovery software, BioMedExperts.com is pre-populated with profiles of 1.5 million life science researchers and their published work, and is updated continually so researchers themselves need do nothing