The healthcare industry is one of the world's largest and fastest-growing industries. Typically accounting for 8-12% of the GDP of most developed nations, healthcare can form an enormous part of a country's economy. In the US, health care accounts for US $314 billion or 17.4% of GDP - compared to 8% spent on energy consumption.
The industry is increasingly turning to digital information and electronic resources to store, retrieve and share information, and ultimately create solutions that aid decision-making, care, quality and efficiency. The global pharmaceutical industry spent US $17 billion on IT in 2010 (7% CAGR) and the hospital information system industry is expected to spend US $35 billion by 2015.
Notoriously complex, the vast majority of healthcare organizations are vastly underutilizing their knowhow. In fact, preventable adverse events cost US $17-29 billion a year and 50,000-100,000 people die each year in the US as a result of medical errors. Unnecessary tests and procedures and preventable medical errors wreak havoc through not only rising costs, but patient mortality. With healthcare reform and regulatory pressures increasing, healthcare delivery organizations are looking for innovative ways of delivering evidence-based, coordinated and accountable care.
Meanwhile, the dwindling pharmaceutical R&D pipelines and the demise of the blockbuster drug is putting increased pressure on pharma companies to improve success rates and reduce costs. Only 10% of ‘successful’ discovery projects make it to market, and a company could spend US $10 - 100 million on a drug candidate before finding out it is unviable.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing is also experiencing new pressure with Quality by Design (QbD) and regulatory bodies paying much closer attention to real-time monitoring and adaptation of processes. The cost of a batch being written off could range from US $500,000 to US $5 million.
As highly-educated knowledge workers, physicians and scientists create, distribute and disseminate knowledge in ways that can be quite hard to capture in a step-by-step process or automate using traditional IT techniques. Verdande Health's case-based reasoning technology works by capturing the tacit knowledge associated with solving concrete cases, and uses these in decision support to help people solve similar cases in the future. This allows us to combine the computer’s ability to consistently search the abundance of data being collected in the healthcare industry every second, with the human mind’s exceptional ability to recognize patterns in data and creative problem solving.
Verdande Health is expecting to start pilot studies in Q2 2013.