Guest blog by Stijn Rogiers, Senior Industry Consultant Health and Life Sciences at SAS
But this industry is also very different from others in the meticulous care with which new products should be treated before releasing them in the market. This too can be a matter of life and death, so every new medicine should be elaborately tested for possible side-effects and for delivering the desired result. This can be a very time-consuming process, because finding the right test group is not always that simple.
Access to other sources of information like anonymized health care insurance data, patient community web sites and other (publicly) available data has opened up the ability for researchers to combine clinical trial data with so-called real world data. Real world data has always been there, but it’s only now that these massive amounts of information can be unlocked and analyzed in real time.
In fact, as Krisa Tailor, industry consultant in SAS’ Health & Life Sciences Global Practice points out in her new book, The Patient Revolution, 80 percent of health is impacted by factors and information gathered outside of the traditional health care system. According to Krisa Tailor, Amazon knows more about patients than their doctors or pharmacists do.
Read more about Krisa Tailor’s insights in her book or in the many blogs she has written on using data analytics in the healthcare ecosystem.
