Digital and music notes, while gliding over the innovation sea
What have in common the greatest songs of all time with latest digital innovations around hope an fears of our time? They are both source of illumination.
What if something that strikes attention today is linked to a great song, one that takes the emotions of a moment and holds it for years to come?
While regularly writing on LinkedIn about topics that catch my attention, I thought about adding some good music looking for a link in the lyrics, in the title, in my memory.
This is a simple experiment, just a game.
#1 Elvis Presley, ‘Jailhouse Rock’
A lockdown is not a solution: it is a temporary measure to reduce the impact on healthcare services, while we get a vaccine that works. We are getting close to solve the problem, it seems. COVID-19 experimental vaccines, developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca produces an immune response in both young and old adults and also it triggers lower adverse responses among the elderly. Let us now wait for other positive news from Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine trials!
Vaccine hopes rise as Oxford jab prompts immune response among old as well as young adults
#2 Van Morrison, ‘Moondance’
Potential water resources on the Moon! The discovery was confirmed thanks to the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). Drill data is the next step to understand how to benefit from it! #NASA #SOFIA
NASA Live: New Science Results from NASA’s SOFIA (Oct. 26, 2020)
#3 Beastie Boys, ‘Sabotage’
In a world where remote connection is becoming the new working environment, it is crucial for organization to increase maturity around cybersecurity risks and protections. This framework has five defined levels that include different areas ranging from basic hygiene to advanced security. Great reading.
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification: Are You in Compliance?
#4 Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’
There is a substantial difference if we compare yesterday and today technologies: for 50 years, engineers have programmed machine by designing rules to accomplish specific goals. This approach, the only possible with the available computational power, was too costly and inflexible, to deal with changing environments. In the last 5 years, this has changed. Machine Learning solutions learn from experience, and programmers do design rules no longer, to make machine work properly. Although it might seem scaring, we do the same: as kids we do not start from grammar to learn languages; we walk on the boundary of our knowledge, incrementally learning from each single experience. If so, what do you need than to start your digital journey? A fast cycle to embody new methods and a good dose of knowledge diversity. You will not get them with money and tech. You need access to right talents with sharp vision and ability to build from ideas.
#4 Glen Campbell, ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’
Lung and pancreatic cancers are difficult to treat. Boosting the immune system or developing a vaccine to prevent them would be a revolutionary discovery. Although this research still has a long way to go before it could help prevent and treat cancer in people, first results on mice show very promising effects. When used the vaccine as a treatment, it slowed the growth of cancers in the mice. When used it as a preventative measure, no cancers grew in the mice for quite a long period of time and, in many cases, cancers never developed. Encouraging results in though time. That’s what we would need for COVID…
Vaccine to treat and prevent lung, bowel and pancreatic cancer shows promise in the lab
#5 Gloria Gaynor. ‘I Will Survive’
Siemens Healthineers 15 minutes antigen test scored 96.72 % sensitivity and 99.22 % specificity based on a clinical study of 317 subjects. Launched last week in Europe, it is easy to administer for healthcare professionals and specifically designed to provide results in locations with limited access to laboratories, like schools or airports. The faster, the better!
#6 The Animals, ‘House of the Rising Sun’
The robots are only the size of a few hairs. Made of nontoxic and biocompatible polymer and metal, microrobots could be the future of diagnostic tools and of drug delivery. If you think this is invasive, well think about a colonoscopy or a gastroscopy. A couple of curiosity:
- These micro-robots are powered from the outside by a magnetic field (no battery)
- The polymer coating keeps the drug payload to fall off before reaching a target location
Tiny Microbots to Jump Around Your Colon, Delivering Controlled Release Drugs
#7 Deep Purple, ‘Smoke on the Water’
Just few minutes to answer all the questions re. social distancing and the use of masks to avoid #COVID-19 spreading. The simulation may be disgusting but it surely communicates the importance of social distancing. This Revolting Supercomputer Simulation Shows How COVID-19 Spreads at a Table
#8 The Clash Should, ‘I Stay or Should I Go?’
In the last 2 years, Amazon, Walmart, UnitedHealth Group have expanded their healthcare services, transforming the traditional landscape. The structured collection of information around new aspect of patients’ life will tell how active principles combine together, creating new competitive advantages on clinical trials. Few thoughts around the topic. Wellcare is shaping around online pharmacy competition: this is how!
#9 Aretha Franklin, ‘Respect’
Rolling out rapid mass-testing seems to be the only way that will be available to fully re-opening economies while #covid-19 still circulating. University of Oxford and Siemens Healthineers are working on rapid antigen tests but it will take until mid 2021 to ramp them up: Manufacturing and distribution are part of the COVID challenge. Is it time that leader Life science orgs share their supply chain services to the global cause? Oxford scientists develop five-minute COVID-19 antigen test
#10 Fleetwood, ‘Mac Go Your Own Way’
While major insurers take part to the digital dare with their own Innovation Labs and Hackathons, Insuretechs raise millions USD in venture capital funding, offering solutions to settle billions in claims. An example? Tractable, an AI startup founded in 2014 that has created an A.I. algorithm producing a near-instantaneous damage estimate via a phone apps to take and upload photos of the accident; Admiral Seguros, the Spanish subsidiary of Admiral, is now pioneering the use of this technology in Europe. Moral of the story: To define the problem you need domain knowledge. If you define the problem, most likely the solution is out there. Before organizing the next hackathon or innovation lab, it would be worth to check what is already available and to validate what are the chances that the investment in time and money will bring something to life.
#11 Bruce Springsteen, ‘Born to Run’
As pharmacy is the place where life sciences and insurance organizations first meet patients, Online Pharmacy is becoming the arena that will evolve the healthcare into the client-centric, preventive wellcare ecosystem. By purchasing in Sept ’18 the online pharmacy PillPack for $753 million, Amazon was the first to put a stake in the ground, intercepting the need of an end to end service to manage patients’ drugs assumption, directly at home with hospital best practice. The second stake has a Walmart’s flag: the largest brick and mortar organization, in June ’20, decided to expand health and wellness services around the same lines, buying technology and intellectual property from CareZone, a start up, born in 2010, that helps its 3.5 M app users to manage their medicines. In Sep ’20, UnitedHealth Group, the US’ largest health insurer, has taken up the gauntlet and has acquired DivvyDose, a start-up that, as PillPack, helps patients delivering medicines in pre-sorted packages. Now they deliver a smart box reassembling pills in daily packs to help patients, tomorrow they will deliver a polypill, changing for ever drugs manufacturing.
#12 Led Zeppelin, ‘Whole Lotta Love’
The new digital trend is to think that MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) is what will make us go viral, creating the next fantastic product or service that will change our life. It does not work like this. Behind any disruptive event, there is an accumulation of thinking and life energy coupled to a cascade of smaller events that include several failures, which culminate in the memorable win. Without that daily work, nothing would have happened. In our days, everybody talks about innovation using as an example, Google, Amazon, or Apple. In these talks, innovative and disruptive have the same meaning, downsizing, discounting, unrecognizing all the incremental work required to create something “new”.
#13 The Beatles, ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’
Defining a contract for a business transformation program is a complex task for several reasons: who signs the contract usually will not be there until the end; the organizations change strategic priorities with time, creating re-works that require extra funds; new comers, on both parties, feel caged by initial agreements and assumptions usually are proven wrong right from the start, no matter what you do. That is when “shading” happens: one of the party will feel the other has not acted reasonably becoming less proactive and cooperative in meeting the other’s needs. So what to do? The proposal in this HBR article is to create conditions to view the contract as a playbook for working through issues fairly and flexibly. To enable that, parties need to share goals and objectives, guiding principles, and robust relationship-management processes. In my view, this is possible only if the engagement relationship scales up around strong leaders and good domain knowledge (in both parties). Only a partnership mode can promote balanced assessment of needs, risks, and resources. Client-Vendor relationship belong to selling buying commodities, it has nothing to do with transformation.
An Innovative Way to Prevent Adversarial Supplier Relationships
#14 Muddy Waters, ‘Got My Mojo Working’
The biggest challenge of Life Science organizations is “siloed working”. No other sector has business and mathematical communities so separated as Life Science. The necessary pharma regulation has created with time a cultural cage that suffocates innovation and does not promote collaboration inside and outside the organization. Translating it to digital, this is the biggest barrier to effectively use the potential of Machine Learning for research.
Development cycle of ML/AI solutions for clinical care.
#15 Public Enemy, ‘Bring the Noise’
Amazon’s journey to transform healthcare into patient centric wellcare is continuing and Alexa is going to play a key role in that. A partnership with digital health company Sharecare will enrich Alexa’s capability to ask and answer 80,000 healthcare questions! Considering that 8 billion digital voice assistants are expected to be in use by 2023 worldwide, this will conduit to innovative solutions to make Alexa and similar devices the first entry point for healthcare.
Sharecare Brings Voice To Healthcare Questions On Alexa
#16 Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel, ‘The Message’
Commuting together, getting a coffee, going for lunch, or sharing the elevator were opportunities of “serendipity” events characterizing the way the information was flowing in the organization, besides formal occasions. Bringing together people within the organization siloed departments or between different countries or cultures, it creates interactions rich in unexpected insights and opportunities which are vital to changing ecosystems. Communication digital technologies will need to evolve around new functionalities that bring back serendipity within the organization. In this article, we have explored four rules “game” that could increase communication across levels eliciting new opportunities.
Work from home is missing a key ingredient: serendipity
#17 Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic, ‘ Force Planet Rock’
Complicated or complex? Designing an aircraft is complicated. It requires to balance weight, cost, adequate payload while keeping it strong, reliable and safe. Days and days defining and detailing specs, that will create clear manufacturing instructions. Implementing a technology can be complicated, expensive sophisticated, but it is not complex. Changing an ecosystem is complex. You can define a theoretical, numerical also experimental model that simulates its behavior under specific conditions, but when conditions change, the output can be strongly different. Transformation programs or innovation practices are complex because they change the ecosystem. Managing them successfully requires continue validation of the assumptions to adapt them; this requires specific skills and mind set. A technology solution, although perfectly implemented, if it does not fit the complexity of the ecosystem, it will never become successful. No adoption, no ROI. An example? the Concorde, one of the most technologically evolved aircraft: designed far before the 1979 oil crisis, it did not adapt to the changing world and due to high fuel cost and empty sits, it has never gained a market.
#18 The Doors, ‘Light My Fire’
A strong focus on the quality of data, a factual implementation strategy, a realistic plan, tools to address new challenges, and mostly importantly a clear user adoption: this is what you need to get a ticket on the digital bandwagon. The catch is that only lucky (few) passengers have at the start all the money they need for the whole few years journey. The best way to fund it, remains to make and sell on the way, diligently getting value from strategic, tactical, and quick win on enhancing operational, customer and business processes. This requires an innovator’s mindset.
#19 Bill Haley and His Comets, ‘Rock Around the Clock’
“I have been running this process for 20 years in the same way in this company; now you come from outside, and you tell me this system is gonna give me better answers?” As a consultant, this is the most crucial question when you transform a business and the adoption jackpot is all there. To answer that, you need to give users time to familiarize with the output, with the differences and also with gaps. Starting clock far before go-live, makes effective your change management. Business transformation is never a commodity, actually it is the opposite. It needs partners, not vendors; network not hierarchy; time awareness more than change neglect; field knowledge to choose what is valuable instead of what is visible.
#20 Steppenwolf, ‘Born to Be Wild’
“While you might get excited by the prospect of inventing the next viral app or work in a colorful google office, there are three key traits you need to have and nurture to successfully innovate in a large organization and you better consider them when planning your next career move…or your exit…wide network, time management and a good dose of resilience are skills and qualities that promote Innovators as persisting “assets” to business change”. Exploring the innovator’s identikit, the most “wanted” profile.
The three essential traits of successful innovators
#21 Tracy Chapman, ‘Fast Car’
A faster and more effective introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) innovations to diagnose and treat disease requires new international standards for reporting of clinical trials for AI. The guidelines will also help medical professionals, regulators, funders and other decision-makers assess the quality of planned clinical trials and assess whether the algorithm is safe and likely to bring about patient benefit.
Patients set to benefit from new guidelines on Artificial Intelligence health solutions
#22 Guns N’ Roses, ‘Paradise City’
For the first time in history, we can make the response to pandemic less political and more factual, using data. Data Science and AI are sharp tools to contain the spread: as an example, think about approaches that consider real time outbreak data as drivers to distribute vaccines. There are two key aspects to make it happen: 1. An equitable access to affordable COVID-19 vaccines everywhere to maximizing the effect and reaching herd immunity progressively and effectively. 2. A strategy that has a global payback beyond short terms interest of specific industries, governments, organizations. Both aspects will create an ecosystem reaction to address research, manufacturing, distribution and strategy challenges. COVAX initiative goes in this direction and it will help to move from treating to anticipating diseases, from Healthcare to Wellcare.
EU offers 400 million euros to WHO-led COVID-19 vaccine initiative
#23 The Righteous Brothers, ‘Unchained Melody’
COVID-19 vaccines Phase III is proceeding and the White House is asking for starting distribution on 1 November, if FDA will approve by then. Putting aside all the polarization/bias related to the #uselection2020, the fact is that producing and distributing 200M doses for herd immunity only in US (4.6B doses worldwide), will require an ecosystem effort beyond the capability of current players. To make it more complicated, “vaccine storage and handling” is a very regulated matter as it crosses operational aspects to medical, administrative, legal, compliance and also financial ones. There is a huge opportunity, a call to action for system integrators, pharma orgs and manufacturers: they can put their expertise in providing services to extend worldwide capacity. Who are the key players of this leg? here is the list*, odds are that it will quickly grow with emblazoned names: · American BioTech Supply · Arctiko A/S · Eppendorf Group · EVERMED GROUP · Haier Biomedical International · Helmer Scientific · LABCOLD LIMITED · PHC Holdings Corporation · Philipp Kirsch GmbH · Thermo Fisher Scientific (*This is not a financial advice)
Vaccine Storage and Handling Resources
#24 The Beatles, ‘In My Life’
#covid19challenge is a “relay race” committing lifescience organizations, manufacturers, distributors, governments. Now that Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have moved their vaccines in Phase III, the baton goes to manufacturers who need to quickly increase their capacity. Catalent Pharma Solutions is the forerunner in this pumping millions in US and Italy. Soon the challenge will be on distributors to optimize last mile delivery. Digital Technologies and cross-sectors capabilities can make a difference here. Last leg? it is about distribution strategy and execution and this is a though call under political and economical turbulence to Governments around the world.
Catalent pumps $50M into Indiana fill-finish capacity with COVID-19 vaccine contracts in hand
#25 Tina Turner, ‘ River Deep, Mountain High’
This is not only about a unique, cool, affordable, AI-based plug-in that ensures a retina check in 60 seconds. This is a new integrated “ wellcare” solution that connects lifescience organizations, universities, ophthalmologists, endocrinologists, primary care providers and pharmacies. Moving screening and analysis technologies to pharmacies (out of healthcare facilities), reducing prices for 75 millions patients only in US #pandemicc numbers) is a key step forward for a patient centric paradigm. #Wellcare ecosystem grows around solving the healthcare last mile challenge
AEYE Health develops advanced AI-based retinal screening with instant results
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Disclaimer: Views or opinions represented in this article are personal and belong solely to the article writer and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the writer may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated.
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