Big Data: Case Study I - Walgreens

There buzz about Big Data is not going no where any time soon. Seminars and workshops are being organized year round to cut through the hype and get to the bottom line, which is how Big Data can actually be a good business tool for small, medium and large scale businesses. More and more business leaders are signing up to participate in these events and to get more insights. The reason why this is also gaining good traction is because its application is not limited to one particular business sector but can be used in almost all industrial sectors from small scale to multinationals. Which is also great news for Big Data enthuse involve in the development and application of Big Data tools.

To make the pudding taste good and hope this would get to give me and anyone who reads the blog a good standing ground, I would start a series of case studies on how big data is being applied in different industries as well as some success stories. Do not worry, if I find good case studies of its failure I would be more than excited to share as well. (Sure its not 100%)

Walgreens - Inovalon partnership for point of care at in-store health clinics.

Below is and except from an article on CIO.com. This is very promising and I can not wait to see some good news come out of this as soon as possible. 

[ Checking Up on You

When a patient from any of the health insurers that partner with Inovalon seeks care at a Walgreens clinic, ePASS analyzes aggregated data and gives the clinician details about the patient's conditions, treatment history and any missing elements. For example, the software can identify that a patient is overdue for a routine screening or hasn't filled a prescription. The system alerts the clinician to these gaps so she can make recommendations to the patient right then and there.

"It can provide a very, very specific encounter for that patient," Helle says.

In contrast, a clinician treating a patient whose records aren't part of the system would have to take a detailed oral history. Even then, the clinicians couldn't know about possible missed screenings or unfilled prescriptions.

Cynthia Burghard, a research director at IDC Health Insights, says Walgreens clinicians should be able to get insights through ePASS that they couldn't get without analytics. But point-of-care analytics is a young field, Burghard says, and it's too early to determine how much analytics can improve patient health.

However, Burghard says, ePASS could set Walgreens apart from its competitors. CVS runs in-store clinics, and Rite-Aid has launched online clinics via kiosks in some of its stores. If insurers see that Walgreens can produce good healthcare outcomes at lower costs, they may direct their Amembers there, she says, to help keep overall costs in check.] 

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Funding for Big Data/Bioengineering

Life Science startups are popping all over The Bay Area (West Coast - US) which is rapidly becomeing Life Sciences own Silicon Valley. Hopefully it can generate so much buzz such that it would eventually have sitcom directors making shows about it just {Mike Judge have done with his hit show "Silicon Valley" if you have not heard about it click the link}. In other for Big Data to be the next big thing not just for life sciences but for other industrial sectors, someone has to take chances to fund researches/researchers and that there is a huge risk for funding startups that are engaged in using Big Data to drive growth, decisions, production, marketing due to the...

"wustljcubes"
Welcoming Big Data in Life Science Research

The US government is already doing this through one of its most revered institution The NIH - National Institute of Health / NIBIB - National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering with a program know as NIH Big Data Knowledge (BD2K). They are funding scientist who are incorporating Big Data into Biomedical Engineeering. I believe this initiative and efforts would go a long way to clear some of the doubts and fuzzy clouds around the applicability of Big Data.

But for now, all the Big Data enthusiasts can hope for an awesomeness in the near future from hard work that is being put in now in Big Data research. As premature Big Data curator I am only getting more hyped and hope to see more of this kind of fundings and also how it can really be implemented in Africa.

Big Data Marketing

The Marketing Bit

Marketing in the twenty first century are for those who respond to customer demands in a positive and highly efficient manner. PR, customer satisfaction, branding, advertising are all link to marketing in one way or the other and the lines separating these means to end the customers trust and bucks are painstakingly fine for any one involved in the marketing field. But with the age of computer generated systems and sophisticated algorithms design by marketing experts the task become much more less daunting. Big Data is emerging as a very efficient tool for so many industrial sectors with a lot of promising leads.
Massive amount of data is collected everyday from credit card swipes, online browsing, phone calls, TV watching, playing video games online (can go bananas with the list). With proper consent and bridging the legal aspects and maintain privacy concerns access to these data can place the best marketing tool in the palms of marketers. Now there are available applications to perform Real-Time Big Data analysis and make it available for those involve in making decisions. Though it might be a much more complex problem of using RT-Big Data to have a direct impact at real time for pharmaceuticals, it creates open doors for more promising exploits in marketing pharmaceutical products to doctors as well as patients. But at the level of production this is a very important tool in terms of producing more or less of a particular product

"Big Data Fuzz Buzz"

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Currently, there is a lot of excitement about Big Data and how it can change industrial landscapes. This might just be the new big thing to ignite an "information revolution" and improve quality of life for millions of people. It is very difficult to navigate and try to comprehend the whole Big Data idea and how it can be useful to an experienced data scientist, not to mention an excited beginner about the idea of solving major problems and improving living conditions, discovering new therapies, better healthcare delivery, financial analysis, marketing analytics, politics (of course) and the list goes on. Major multinational companies are utilizing Big Data as a key tool for decision making process. There are also huge database facilities storing incredible amount of data from scientific from hundreds of years of research work. Information technologist, software and hardware engineers have done a great job at bringing all this information to the forefront of research and make it accessible at a great extend.

With rise in Big Data buzz, science students are gearing their careers toward a more IT and data interpretation and application focus and how to implement the ever changing computing would into their careers and developmental skills. There are still great leaps to make but the strides that have been made so far has got the attention of leading scientist, C position leaders of big pharma and biotech companies during the decision making process to drive the companies objectives and goals. Personalized medicine would certainly be driven by personal data analytics and with an aggregation of millions of data from individuals who knows what might lie beneath?

There are some scientific techniques emerging that would have quite an impact on healthcare and how medicine is being applied. Directed evolution and next generation sequencing. Illumina annouced a $1000 dollar solution to decode the human genome in one year; a drastic overhaul of the previous methods used which took way too much time (decades) and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete the project. This is really exciting news for scientist who are very engage in this sector of the research, it would now be able to have information in a much faster way to continue a research project, apply for funding, which might have being otherwise not be as easy, cheap and rapid.

No!!,  I'm just kidding...Courtesy Of KDnuggets

Though this is relatively new in countries with well advanced and very sophisticated computer systems, a thorough understanding of the science and practicability of it is still been revealed,  it is still practical for emerging and developing markets to dive into Big Data before its too late being left behind, and instead of being at the core of the discussion they would be spending time doing catchup and yet borrowing intellectual property while maybe still in debt of previous ones. At least they would not be left behind by a huge gap and can close the gap between research in those parts of the world that are technologically handicap with countries of astonishing technological advancement. Most of them have the capacity to handle and store huge amounts of data and make it available for scientist doing research at local institutions and research centers and universities. Companies utilizing Big Data for research and decision making purposes would be attracting a lot of attention and from investors and even from end users.

Life Science Made Easy

During the past decades, drug development took about two decades from discovery to marketing. It was and still is to an extend a painstaking process that consumes billions of dollars and resources to eventually come to the end user. Most drugs that enter R&D do not even get to reach the markets for several reasons including; not catching critical preclinical steps, approval stalemate, ethical concerns, change in companies internal drive, change in consumer preferences or demand. Fortuanately, technology is coming in farely rapidly overide some of the major issues facing Pharma today. Contract research organizations and contract manufacturing organizations are becoming the solution to solve this problem and also do some facial make over for the already bad image that general public now perceive the industry. CROs have always been there but now there are easier ways for researchers to hire them to perform services in various service areas or even highly specialized research areas.

Today there are platforms which offers a researcher or anyone with an online access (from Palm Beach or Semester Beach- Cameron) a single license with an ability to develop a drug, biologics, vaccines etc from scratch to finish, unprecedented access to the worlds leading scientist and most up to date knowledge in life sciences all for free. The process is fast, reliable and very manageable through platforms that offer different interfaces for the process of finding the right vendor for your specific need. Assay Depot is one of this platform. Science has never been this exciting and interactive across the board. It is an incredible idea that has already being implemented and is rapidly growing among large, medium and small size pharma and biotech companies.

For researchers especially in developing countries that have difficulties finding the right CRO, or having access to new scientific research this is a "Legit Robin Wood". The variety of vendors and the choices it provides for the researcher is outstanding. Also, it gives the scientist an unprecedented access to world class and most recent know-how in a specific research topic and to the worlds leading scientist.

The future of Pharma is bright and one company that is leading the way is Assay Depot. Just like Google charge how search is done online and Amazon for shopping, Assay Depot is a combination of both i.e. Google/Amazon = Assay Depot for life sciences.