The Spice of Life

I was honored to share a meal with two Life Sciences luminaries recently – one is the retired Chairman of a big Pharma company, the other the Chief Medical Officer and a very visible face and voice of her employer.

Both have “Southern” roots; so, when their meals arrived I was amused to learn they both carry their own supply of Tabasco with them. Out came the bottles to garnish their meals for as she said: “…it just makes everything better.” The right spice, in the right amount, at the right time, enhances any meal.

I recall this as dinner included a very lively discussion of the challenges facing big pharma: declining revenues because of patent expirations, diminishing access to health care providers, healthcare reform and cost containment, shrinking sales forces, the need for Pharma to regain public trust, and the role of technology in addressing these changes.

The most salient take-away was her comment: “You cannot affect quality by focusing on cost; however, you can affect cost by focusing on quality.” Her point is that BIG DATA offers the health care and life sciences industry unprecedented opportunity to affect change by providing very personalized healthcare. Her vision includes pharma becoming the trusted source of insight for how to diagnose and treat a patient based on pattern recognition and inferences to support healthcare providers, drawing from extensive outcome analysis with countless patients across varying demographic populations.

She believes mobility is a key enabler of this evolution and that using evidence-based outcomes, at the point-of-patient interaction to direct prescriptive treatment protocols (quality focus) will ultimately provide us healthier people and lower costs.

To paraphrase: like Tabasco, BIG DATA becoming VERY SMALL DATA “just makes everyone better.”