IT drives lifesciences: Part 2

Although the life sciences industry is heavily regulated, IT companies see gold mine in it much the same way as they saw money in the financial sector after the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. “It may be that the regulated nature of life sciences could drive technology growth. For example, in the US, the HIPPA law requires protections for privacy of medical records.  While electronic records are not mandated, paper records are simply insufficient to meet the privacy requirements of the law,” says Carlson.  “If you establish an electronic health record (EHR) system, you also have the opportunity to make a digital pharmacy or digital radiography and even some decision-helping tools into that software.  The US is the most pressing regulation driving technology, but other countries may follow the US example.”

Also in an industry where government, most likely, is the payer for R&D, companies have to be more productive. According to Carlson, if you can get costs under the reimbursement level, the more profit you make. That’s not just true in the US certainly, with medicare payments but it’s also true in China, where in clinical labs they are increasingly being compensated on their production levels.  Technology is the only way to speed things up and collect more income. 

According to Carlson, life sciences companies have been late adopters as it has most of the time been a very local industry.  There’s less pooled resources, less capital to make technology investments.  In other industries, a CEO can make change happen across many countries. 

To take a different tact, in biotechnology and diagnostics, there are some genetic and molecular tests that cannot be performed by human hands and human eyes.  Some genetic tests, for example, must be read by a computer.  “So there has to be computer and allied software in the lab, whether or not you like it. The same is true in biopharma manufacturing also.  Computers cannot be left out of the process of making these sensitive materials,” Carlson says. 

Growing Data: Industry to the rescue

As with any industry, huge amounts of data are being generated everyday in the life sciences industry. Data will definitely eat up a huge amount of digital space but this stored information, especially clinical results maintained in database for generations will aid the bioinformatics companies in detecting hereditary clues to disease risk of patients in future. Thus, clinical data for generations will aid in predicting diseases or at least risk of congenital diseases through data mining and correlation, and provide a platform for genetic engineering.

Now that the life sciences industry is as dependant on the IT, there will be some impact. Life sciences IT companies had entered the market along with the other IT companies focusing on other industry verticals. But, since life science industry is a conservative industry, when compared to industries such as mobile communications, commercial application and IT penetration in this industry took more time than in other industries. “Thus, we see that it is not that technology has entered late, but rather adoption of the technology by the industry has taken considerable amount of time leading to late market recognition of healthcare and life sciences IT companies,” Dutta quips.

It’s good that the IT companies have penetrated the life sciences market late compared to the insurance and finance industry, because the whole industry has learned from past mistakes and with life sciences being a crucial sector, being late is always better.