Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
realized early on that each company existed as part of an extended ecosystem
that relied on the ability to do business with other partners and competitors
and hence where the need for interoperable processes and information fl ows
were critical to their mutual success.
1.3.1
Overview of Existing Precompetitive Alliances
Without going into details on all the other industries, some have direct paral-
lels with discovery life science from both other life science areas and fi nancial
services. The fi nancial services industry created the VISA processing standards
and in creating this concept has led to an explosion in the ways that credit
cards are used and their ease of interoperability. Other examples of open
approaches include the insurance industry (Polaris) to support data exchange
between insurance brokers and the insurance companies offering the policies.
In the clinical development workfl ow of development pharmaceuticals the
need to work with multiple partners as part of the delivery of clinical trials and
the later delivery of health care services to patients has provided the environ-
ment for groups such as the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium
(CDISC: www.cdisc.org) and Health Level 7 (www.hl7.org) to be founded and
evolve over several years. The drivers here were a need for interoperable
standards for information delivery and data markup to support effective and
clear communication for submission of clinical trials data and the later man-
agement of health care information.
The way these companies do business has changed as the global economy
has evolved, but delivering critical information to scientists continues to be
the key part of the R&D informatics groups within these pharmaceutical and
agrochemical companies and support organizations. There are various ways
that the development of software and delivery of information to scientists can
be improved through collaboration and open standards. There is evidence
from other global businesses where strong open standards have benefi ted a
whole industry sector and delivered improved innovation in the face of cost
pressures.
1.3.2
Pistoia Alliance: Construct for Precompetitive Collaborations
There has been a history of organizations working together to promote
common standards in the early-stage life science industry over the last decade
both as new groups established specifi cally for life science [Interoperable
Information Infrastructures Consortium (I3C: www.i3c.org), Society for Bimo-
lecular Sciences (SBS: www.sbs.org), BioIT Alliance (www.bioitalliance.org)]
and those attached to larger groups but wishing to explore and adapt into life
science [Object Management Group (OMG: www.omg.org), World Wide Web
Consortion (W3C: www.w3c.org)]. The success rate has been variable over the
years with various initiatives coming and going and others building a portfolio
of activities and evolving. Much of the thinking of setting up the Pistoia
Search WWH ::
Custom Search