Awash in Information

User stories from the knowledge front

Knowledge management forthe life science industry

In developing life-saving drugs and medical devices, scientists and researchers need information at their fingertips—from FDA regulations and forms to internal project planning resources. The right information should be available without searching through volumes of irrelevant and useless data.

BioQ, a software tool developer for the pharmaceutical industry, wanted to implement an automatic infrastructure system that could be personalized to meet the needs of individual users, while filtering out extraneous information. Further, the company wanted a solution that would connect life science professionals with colleagues sharing similar research interests, and that would eliminate the duplication of work across the enterprise while enabling sharing of best practices, training resources and regulatory compliance information.

BioQ creates software tools that are said to decrease the time it takes pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical and medical device companies to complete the regulatory process to bring new products to market. The product line integrates knowledge management, process management and training tools to improve productivity and submit online applications in the FDA-required format, according to a recent press release. To help better manage and share knowledge, BioQ decided to integrate infrastructure software from Autonomy into its Internet-based software. The new technology was embedded into BioQ’s software and applications to categorize and deliver unstructured information to the company’s profiled customers, including the FDA and other regulatory agencies. That task previously required staff to acquire, manually tag, process and send the information.

“The life science industry is awash in information,” says Jeff Anderman, BioQ’s president and CEO, “and [the new software] allows us to develop products that empower the knowledge worker in a biotech, pharmaceutical or medical device company and provide great efficiency.”

According to Anderman, the benefits of the new system include:

• complete automation of information categorization, tagging and linking, which eliminates manual efforts, saving time and money;;

• true personalization of content for clients and their employees; ;

• timely and accurate deliver of relevant information; ;

• enhanced information retrieval through concept-matching technology.;