Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Book Review
Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research
Ekins, Hupcey and Williams
Copyright 2011; John Wiley and Sons Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey
By Jeffrey Harris
[...]
August 11, 2011
I am deep into a book that I would not ordinarily choose as recreational reading. I tend to enjoy novels and journals such as Scientific American with an occasional rag on aviation and motorcycling thrown in.
What caught my eye was the word "Collaborative" in the title of what otherwise would have been glanced over as another dry textbook. Of course the uses of words like computational technologies and biomedical didn't hurt as healthcare informatics is my field. That said, when the day is done and I have a headache from reading argumentative blogs, technical standards material from DC and policy diatribe, the last thing you would expect on my bed-stand is this text.
So here is the deal: I am so deeply saddened by our species propensity to argue for their differences as opposed to celebrate their similarities I saw the 548 page orange textbook as a source of hope.
I am not a scientist and prefer to label myself with words like curious economist; "a stranger in a strange land" or perhaps a Communitarian Republicrat. What unveiled itself as I turned the pages was not a suspenseful thriller but a truthful, meaningful accounting of an evolving social science, perhaps a hope that the pure thrill of crowdsourcing may accelerate the process of discovery while preserving a free market economy. Could it be that we can be creative and competitive while breaking the barriers that separate academic organizations, corporations, countries and frail human egos? Is it possible to have a positive return on our individual investments while preserving shareholder equity without hiding our data from each other out of the fear of stolen intellectual property?
The book contains twenty eight chapters broken into four sections: 1) Getting People to Collaborate; 2) Methods and Processes for Collaboration; 3) Tools for Collaboration and 4) The Future of Collaborations. I count 56 contributors from the US, India, France, the Netherlands, Canada, The United Kingdom, and Sweden. A multi-national task force if you will of some of the world's finest minds in life and physical science and `cloud-native' knowledge-sharing.
The Forward; written by Alpheus Bingham Ph.D., where only three pages- is enough to hook the reader as Dr. Bingham describes pharmaceutical companies as three headed enterprises strained to 1) produce chemicals and biological products that decrease human suffering, 2) broker and distribute technical knowledge to the medical community and 3) somehow maintain a pipeline of products that require constant innovation: Certainly a tall order for any solo organization.
I had mixed emotions as I read Dr. Bingham's comments as he presented his information without bias but more the perspective of a curious observer wondering how such magic could continue to evolve without a transformation in both corporate and human behavior: I was hooked!
I won't exhaust you with my verbose nature but simply attend to a few other meaningful comments that I hope will stimulate you to consider this text for your shelf.
Chapter One by Chris Waller, Ramesh Durvasula and Nick Lynch presents a wonderful history of the industries of pharmacy, bio-technology and government funded academic drug discovery. If you enjoy policy formulation (pun intended) or in any-way scape-goat any one industry, individual or political party for our health care economy woes; I suggest you slowly read between the lines for the real history of how our healthcare system became 2X the cost of the next highest country with population health outcomes that at times mirror lesser developed nations. For those of us who attended college when our microbiology classes were teaching DNA recombination as new technology you will truly appreciate how `thoughts' can take on their own form as currency for exchange of utility. Suddenly, you will realize that America has been paying American dollars for many years that were for pure discovery; often footing the R&D bill of new therapy for the rest of the world.
What the authors suggest is that all disruptive or innovative ventures that are "high risk" from an economic perspective establish mechanisms for externalizing research, sharing information and choosing alliances as a pre-competitive strategy: The value of course being decreased redundancy, better design, faster products to market and the creation of a sustainable value added matrix of organizations supporting pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
Why is this important to me?
It is my judgment through years of experience that we unnecessarily relearn the same knowledge time and time again through competitive grant processes that are a slight variation on previous work. The outcomes are always the same and multiple revenue streams are continually tapped for philanthropic or tax-payer funding to support redundant research. I am not inferring that this is malicious behavior just a validation of the fact that at any point in time "The future is here but not evenly distributed".
When I came to North Carolina it was with the intention of learning about health policy relating to care for our indigent. Shall I say: "Learning Occurred"? In 2003 I created a Venn diagram for my boss that showed a bio-psycho-social data overlap between our School System, Public Health, Behavioral Health, Social Service and Medicaid sub-systems. Each database was created through its attendant silo of legislative policy and DHHS division structure. Coveted by its creators; each was built on a different platform and utilized different data mining tools for population analysis and reporting. This was all occurring while we were trying to understand why some Medicaid recipients received a service called `case management' from several different agencies. The poor recipient hadn't a clue as to why so many people were visiting and calling with different instruction sets for disease management; the poor tax payers (both Federal and State) didn't understand the exponential increase in the cost of this service line. My bosses last task to me prior to a much grieved premature death from cancer was to assign me to a committee (a collaborative if you will) to unify business and data requirements across all DHHS agencies. He denied a request for yet another $160M sub-system, we started our team and he died the following year.
Today, these isolated systems still exist and believe it or not I have seen worse cases after spending fifteen months in a federally qualified health center. All created by government revenue silos and disparate providers of care in competition for the same insured populace.
This insanity must stop. We are far from realizing the economies of scale that could be achieved. Health reform has started and perhaps the scientific contributors to the this textbook can provide some direction.
If you vote, read the book: If you are a legislator read the book: especially if you think something called Obama-Care actually exists: Evolution people; it's all about evolution of business and human pride.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research (Wiley Series on Technologies for the Pharmaceutical Industry)
Methods, Processes, and Tools for Collaboration
"The time has come to fundamentally rethink how we handle the building of knowledge in biomedical sciences today. This book describes how the computational sciences have transformed into being a key knowledge broker, able to integrate and operate across divergent data types."-Bryn Williams-Jones, Associate Research Fellow, Pfizer
The pharmaceutical industry utilizes an extended network of partner organizations in order to discover and develop new drugs, however there is currently little guidance for managing information and resources across collaborations.
Featuring contributions from the leading experts in a range of industries, Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research provides information that will help organizations make critical decisions about managing partnerships, including:
Serving as a user manual for collaborations
Tackling real problems from both human collaborative and data and informatics perspectives
Providing case histories of biomedical collaborations and technology-specific chapters that balance technological depth with accessibility for the non-specialist reader
A must-read for anyone working in the pharmaceuticals industry or academia, this book marks a major step towards widespread collaboration facilitated by computational technologies.
0 comments:
Post a Comment