Feb
18
Clinical Killing in Ann Arbor
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
What is the difference between the value of a database company in 2012 and then, forty-three inflation-free months later, in February 2016? According to IBM Watson Health, who have just bought Truven Health for $2.6 billion from Veritas Capital, who bought it from Thomson in 2012 for $1.25 billion, a neat 100%. Now, private equity is capable of wondrous things in short time periods, and Mike Boswood and his team are great managers and have made great strides with the company, but when things double in value over such a short period, other factors must be coming into play. Maybe there is a sudden perceived shortage of clinical evidence data in healthcare? Hardly seems likely. Fresh stuff is produced daily, and better recorded than ever before. The good folk at Hearst Business will be looking at the balance sheet valuations of Zincs and First Databank, and over at the BMJ, Clinical Evidence takes on a bright new gleam of interest. A gusher in Ann Arbor, Truven’s base, could float an awful lot of other boats.
But, just a minute, what is Truven Health Analytics? Well, at base dear old Micromedex, an indexing and recording database for clinical evidence. And is it sparkly and new? No, it’s about 40 years old. It records decisions and costs, centred on drug use, and has spawned great tools for doctors and hospitals its Formulary Advisor, Red Book and PDR Electronic Library are the tool sets that enable administrators and clinicians to know if they are using the right products in the right combinations at the right dosages and for the right price. Pretty valuable stuff then? Yes, it fully justified the price that Veritas paid in 2012. In earlier times it had been hard to deploy the data effectively – I remember initially encountering it on microfiche (use Google to look this up if you are under 50). When it was densely impenetrable. But Truven has, in recent years, added another word to its title. It is now Truven Health Analytics. And therein lies our tale.
Truven, I must be clear, does more than pure clinical evidence. Services like Marketscan or the patient information services support policy, administration and patient welfare. Its client roster begins with the 100 top US hospitals and includes another 8400 healthcare data buyers. Anyone entering the sector would love to get hands on its client list. So has IBM bought this as a prestige, flagship purchase? There is no evidence of that. Watson Health has made three acquisitions already. Phytel and Explorys have been with them for ten months, and the most recent, Merge Healthcare, cost a mere billion dollars. However, this is the first large data play they have made, and one of the key issues here is probably people – one thing that IBM would have been short of in healthcare was sector data scientists, curators and architects. Now it has a whole cadre. And yet, a 100% price hike?
So let’s get back to that Analytics word that has added itself to the Truven name. Truven, I learnt four years ago, stands for a concatenation of “trusted” and “proven”. Neat, eh? Health is Health. And Analytics… stands for a burgeoning ambition to turn analysis into solutions. The use of the word in the company name was, I suspect, a sign post pointing towards a destination. But for IBM it represents an arrival point – where they now are and intend to be. The coming together of Watson and Truven is thus the wheel hitting the road, or the data hitting the fan. It had to be a big price, if it is to carry the weight of problems solved, solutions created, revolutionary productivity gains and quality hurdles surmounted. You could call this the marketing price, securing not so much the value of Truven but the power and importance of what happens next at IBM Watson Health.
Yet I still have two niggling reservations. One concerns healthcare data. It’s a sector famous for data profusion. All that stuff so arduously recorded and so expensively stored in administrative systems built to withstand the storms of litigation by insurers and patients. If Truven and Hearst can collect it at source, why couldn’t IBM? If IBM is creating a big data solution, then the highly organised and structured databases of Hearst and Truven are a drop in their ocean. Why not lease the data, already becoming commoditised, rather than owning it? We come back to all those data scientists but by now they are beginning to sound like very expensive staffers.
And my final concern, of course, is for my friends and colleagues at Thomson Reuters. Mercifully the trustees of the Woodbridge Trust, beneficial owners of 53% of that company, are supremely unlikely to read this blog, but surely they will find out at some point that an asset their management disposed of in four years ago has doubled in price in the intervening period. They will then reflect that their managers are currently selling Thomson Reuters Science and IP. In patent information and in science citation indexation, these are two of the most data rich information companies in the market place. As ever, it seems that Thomson Reuters want to sell both units together, always looking at a clean deal with low fees. But what if a private equity player should buy them, split them up and add the word Analytics on the end of each – and then sell them for double the purchase price. Thomson Reuters only has one shareholder who matters but that would not entirely reduce the mutterings about valuations and returns. In fact, someone in the City is probably running some analytics on it right now!
Jan
24
Think Block Chain, not Bitcoin
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, privacy, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Here is a really great moment to celebrate. A readable UK government report with a real impact on markets (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/492972/gs-16-1-distributed-ledger-technology.pdf). It tells us what Honduras and Estonia are doing that we are yet to fully consider. Yet it fingers a new area of creativity that some authorities liken to the dotcom boom – a new configuration that we relaunch B2B inventiveness in the network around commercial workflows in a way that will take us much further than conventional network technologies. So far it has been the instrument of the crypto currency businesses, but this is far more than that, and the U.K. Office of Science paper, prepared by a team reporting to the Government Science Advisor, Sir Mark “Open Access” Walport, deserves the very widest attention, especially in Shoreditch, Tech City and other parts. There is enough here to launch a whole raft of B2B start-ups.
So let’s start a bit closer to the beginning. When Bitcoin was launched in 2008 the thought was that if a shared, encrypted database could be installed and mirrored across the network, then transactions updated to each ledger and validated would form a useful way of circumventing the use of cash by creating a means for secure asset transfer. Data thus added in each instance of the transaction thus created a data “block”, and as transactions grew more numerous and blocks thus chained together more widespread it became even safer – intervention and alteration of data would have to take place on thousands of machines at the same instant, even if the encryption was circumvented. These Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have seemed like the white hope of interference-free financial transactions, but despite the fame of Bitcoin have been very hard to move into popular focus.
But this too is a characteristic of the Internet age. Technologies arrive, get used on a narrow front, get half-forgotten, and then come sweeping back in to answer questions that were never even thought about when they were invented. This appears to be the fate of DLT. When the Hondurans wanted a new land title system that was not open to third part falsification and could be updated by parties to a land deal or ownership change, then this was obvious. When the Estonians sought a way of leveraging one of their areas of expertise – the use of PKI (public key) encryption technologies – the DLT provided the answers. Amongst the case studies in the report is one after my own heart – an angel investor service network called Funderbeam which uses DLT to allow investors to turn their investments into a trade able currency and move money from investment to investment, preserving investor liquidity while avoiding the lock-in normally experienced by start-up investors.
So DLT has real benefits where asset classes are being exchanged. But we have not been in the data game for the last 30 years without knowing that data itself is an asset. This week, during an eye examination and an annual routine Heart examination, I found myself wishing for DLT in healthcare. What if my records were automatically updated, and any of my health advisors, authorised by me, could see every alteration in drugs or treatment decided by other practitioners treating me? And if I sell my house or trade in my car, can the whole intermediary network please be informed at the same time, including the bank, the insurer, the new owners and the registrars in government who need to know these things?
In the early days of the Web we spoke earnestly about Disinter mediation. Then many of us spoke equally confidently about re-intermediation, as we saw how markets moved fresh digital agents into place in digital marketplaces. It may be harder for the middleman to reinvent himself in the brave new world of DLT technology, however, and taking jobs and increasing productivity will become the focus of inventiveness in this area. Before the last election the UK government made a half-hearted attempt to privatise its own Land Registry. That organisation enters records by hand as well as digitally and employs 5000 people in the business of admits ration and verification. Now imagine it Honduran-style: land transfers are entered by sellers and verified by buyers and their lenders, insurers and other concerned parties, and archived in a block chain where all transactions are archived and held. While we may need an office of Land Transfer Governance we may never again need the current structures. Anyone reading this report in the Shareholder Executive should sell government agencies fast.
All this sounds like redress for the problems of Big Government. But there are other aspects that could affect every business in the land. If we look at business relationships as an asset, then the report suggests that Smart Contracts are likely to become the way in which we action and police business deals:
“Smart contracts are being considered for a wide variety of uses, particularly for regulatory compliance, product traceability and service management, and also to defeat counterfeit products and fraud in the following sectors:
• Food
• Financial Services
• Energy
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health
• Aerospace
• Aviation
• Telecommunications
• IT and communications
• Transport
• Utilities
• Agriculture
• Oil and gas”
So if we are content to sit back and relax, thinking that the technology behind Bitcoin is a “sometime, maybe” phenomenon. This technology is as potentially disruptive as the Web was once perceived to be, it will spark a host of start-ups and within a year every one of us will be thinking about how it applies to what we do – and how we live. And this technology centres on the SmartPhone! Happy New Year!
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