Israeli Software

I think we’re rapidly approaching a  point in time where people will pay for privacy.  I know that after a super-hot month of August with the house full of kids chain-watching Ratatouille, I would pay someone for some privacy.

The privacy controls that governments are attempting to impose on social media and the technical safeguards that social networks like Facebook are implementing seem to be band-aids on a larger and much more significant two-part problem

1. How to enable individuals to control the information they disclose?
2. How to enable individuals to put their value in front of their social graph?

I believe that the brunt of the public debate has been on question number 1 – primarily because of the sheer size and entertainment/leisure time/socializing/shmoozing/networking elements of Facebook and LinkedIn and other social media web sites.  As Bruce Schneier has noted in some of his recent essays – privacy on the Net is not necessarily about forbidding disclosure  (like the regulators are trying to do with PII and PHI compliance regulation) but about controlling what you share.

But  entertainment, leisure time, socializing and networking are not everything in life – and as a matter of fact – most people go to work and either create, make, sell or buy for a living.   Question number 2 is about increasing your disclosure in a controlled way and putting your value forward to your customers and not behind the company that you represent. Value backwards (as opposed to value forwards) is the way most information technology and big pharma is sold today – you work for a security integrator and you’re reselling someone else’s product extolling the virtues of Websense DLP (like 10 other resellers in your geography) or you’re a medical sales representative for MSD and you’re extolling the advantages of Remicade for treating Crohn’s disease.

But – we all know that the reason the customer is talking to you is because he values you (or thinks you might have something of value to sell).

Last year we did a private, professional networking project for one of the big 3 innovative pharmas at one of their Central European offices. It was a successful clinical trial of what we thought was a good idea – enabling medical sales representatives to place their value in front of their social graph of doctors.   As we approach release of the beta version of a productized version – it seems time to get some feedback on the notion of private, controlled networking. So here it is – feel free to comment online or email me.

I saw a post recently on Controlled social networking for student collaboration. One of the comments lamented not having the head count to install technology to control Facebook access by students.

Frankly – as a data security and compliance consultant who does a lot of work with corporates in social networking (both on the application side and security side), I  would not use technology as an excuse for social media abuse.

This is a cultural and behavioral issue similar to any other content abuse issue. It starts with education: at home, in the school and with parental and teacher role models.

Current definitions of privacy are changing. Regulatory definitions of privacy used by legislators in the credit card and HIPAA compliance space do not seem to be relevant for under 25 users of Facebook – who are happy to disclose pictures of themselves but very careful about what they show and who they would share the media with.  I believe that as social media becomes part of  the continuum of social interaction in the physical  and virtual worlds, privacy becomes an issue of  personal, discretionary disclosure control.

To this extent, it seems to me that we are moving rapidly towards a new generation of social networking that is much closer to what happens in the physical world – centered on individual perspectives, one person, their friends, selective disclosure and information leakage by word of mouth not by IP protocols, social media and public access Web sites like Facebook.

But – that is already another technology kettle of fish.

One of the biggest challenges in global multi-center clinical trials (after enrollment of patients) is collaboration between multi-center clinical trial teams: CRAs, investigators, regulatory, marketing, manufacturing, market research, data managers, statisticians and site administrators.

In a complex global environment, pharma do not have control of computer platforms that local sites use – yet there is an expectation that file and information sharing should be easy yet there are three areas where current systems break down:

1. People forget what files had been shared and with whom they have been shared

2. People have difficulty sharing files with colleagues in a way that is accessible to everyone – firewalls, VPNs, enterprise content management, DRM, corporate data security policy, end point security, file size – these are all daunting challenges when all you want to do is share a file with a colleague in Berlin when you are working in a hospital in Washington.

3. Notifications – how do you know when new information has been added or updated? Not having timely notifications on updates can be a big source of frustration resulting in team members pinging other members over and over again with emails.

Over the past 10 years a generation of complex enterprise content management software systems have grown up – they are bloated, expensive, difficult to implement, not available to the entire multi-center team and in many cases written by English speaking software vendors who cannot conceive that there are people in the world who feel more comfortable communicating in their native tongue of French, German, Hebrew or Finnish!

We are developing (currently in beta with a Tier 1 bio-pharma in EMEA)  a Web-based, agile collaboration system with a light-weight, easy to use, simple architecture, that saves time and reduces IT and travel costs – and literally gets everyone on the same page.

The system resolves the 3 breakdowns above while recording all user activities in a detailed audit trail in order to meet internal control and FDA regulatory requirements.

The system also provides significant cost benefits in addition to improving information collaboration:

• Reduces travel costs: Using online events, integrated media and file sharing and discussions, the clinical trial team and investigators can conduct program reviews, education activities and special events.

• Eliminates proprietary IT: No proprietary software or hardware and no IT integration. No extra investments in information technologies, CRM, sales force integration and data mining.

If this interests you – drop me a line!

After a discussion with a client today about privacy and data security in social networking, I started looking at physician portals and came across a fascinating post from Dr. Scott Shreve – Knowledge Prostitution enabling Aggregated Voyeurism: Is this a Business Model?

Voyeurism (voi-yûr’ ĭz‘əm) n.

1. The practice in which an individual derives pleasure from surreptitiously observing people.

2. Derives from the French verb voir (to see); literal translation is “seer” but with pejorative connotations.

The client told me that they were considering using a closed physicians’ portal to help market their products.  The business model used by closed, advertising-free, doctors portals (Sermo.com in the US or Konsylium24.pl in Poland) involves paying for market intelligence data collected from the “user generated content” in the community.   The tacit assumption is that physicians will talk freely inside a gated, advertising-free community.

Sermo.com kicks some of the revenue back to the users but the precision and recall of this market intelligence is not clear to me, considering the amount of noise in vertical social communities like Sermo and Konsylium24.pl and open social media like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What is clear to me – is that there are data security and privacy implications when the community operator data-mines user-generated content for profit.  As a concrete example – a recent thread on Konsylium24.pl went something like this:

Doctor Number 1:

You know – Professor X is the KOL (key opinion leader) for company Y’s drug Z.  He says that drug Z is extremely effective for treating the indications of infectious disease Alpha.

Doctor Number 2:

Of course – Professor X is an acknowledged expert on infectious diseases, but he is also an expert on cash and knows how to do the math and add up the numbers…

I asked my client – “and for this kind of data, your parents sent you to medical school?

This took me back to the days of Firefly, Alexa, Hotbar and use of personal information as currency – collected with “collaborative filtering” and “automated inference” from people browsing the web.

Web 2.0 and social media seems to be going through a similar evolution as Web 1.0 – trying to monetize content by  data aggregation and analysis using “collaborative filtering” techniques.  This may have been a sexy looking business model for Venture Capitalists during the dot.com era, but in 2009 (5 years after Sermo.com launched) and a few months after their well-publicized breakup with the AMA; automated inference, knowledge prostitution and aggregated voyeurism may be  yielding to direct communications between people in B2B communities, social and professional networks.

Why peep through a window when you can just knock on the front door and ask?

My research article on “Social software – Reconstructing the market boundaries of pharmaceutical sales” was published on the rapidly growing UK healthcare site PharmaPhorum yesterday -  one of my first forays outside the data security space in a long time but a direction with a potential to make a big change in the way pharmas sell drugs:

Pharmaceuticals and Kirby vacuums: The last bastions of door-to-door sales?

A medical representative operates in the center of a “cluster”¹ of doctors that they personally know and meet with face-to-face. The power of social networking relative to conventional on-line marketing, stems from a social view of learning, where understanding is socially constructed, and the message we get is actually less important than whom we get it from.

Social and medical may be a perfect fit, but how will social influence medical sales?

Read more here

It’s the 9th Jahrzeit (annual anniversary) of my Mom’s passing away at age 76 from MSA (multiple system atrophy). There is a lot I can and probably should write about this but there’s no way back once you get MSA. My Mom was clear of mind but almost unable to speak properly towards the end and that was the hardest part I guess.  A year later, in 2001,  I  was kicking around an idea, with Dr. Nir Giladi at the Movement Disorder Clinic at Ichilov, of creating a community for care givers, patients and doctors in order to provide a support system that would integrate the transitions of care between the different specialists.  As Tim Rothwell from Sanofi-Aventis speaking about transition of care issues – candidly observed:

For those who have family members or friends who have experienced repeated encounters with the healthcare system, the only consistent thing they believe it delivers is confusion and, sometimes, flawed outcomes.’

We actually got as far as submitting a NIH-style grant proposal to the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research for a networked Palm-based device for sharing data collected by care-givers in order to provide a single source of data for the multiple doctors involved in care of MSA patients.  We thought it might be a good way to get past the ego and technical challenges in transition of care.  After we didn’t get funding – I moved on – by that time it was the previous hi-tech downturn and my mind was on other things I guess.

Therefore – it was gratifying (frustrating? for me to recently discover Patients Like Me which is precisely the community for care-givers, doctors and patients we needed 9 years ago. Great work guys!

In my previous post I attempted to build an argument that “classical” consumer social media like Facebook is not a good fit for a pharmaceutical company due to the way they market innovative drugs.

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