Oracle Software saving lives

Thanks in large part to today's large-scale databases, companies can now afford to store trillions of bytes of valuable information.  However, storing the data is just the beginning and the real challenge is accessing these huge data stores and mining them for statistically significant events.

Nowhere is this research as prevalent as it is in the area of Medical Informatics, where highly skilled doctors are leveraging on patient treatment information to perform advanced predictive modeling, measuring the efficacy of life-saving drugs and detecting dangers that have a direct impact on the health and safety of millions of patients.

The recent recalls of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration highlight some unavoidable risks associated with all clinical trials and suggest that the only way to fully understand a system of complex drug interactions is to sample and analyze real-world data.

Whether scientists are researching the behavior of drugs, studying the demand for products, or learning about the behavior of software, the application of heuristic techniques has answered the question about "How things work".

Using powerful Oracle tools such as Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Data Mining, medical researchers are discovering trends and patterns that will improve the health care for millions of people across the globe.

We are also starting to see medical experts combining their medical qualifications with Oracle database certification, as with Dr. Timothy Wu, MD OCP, an Oracle scientist working for the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington DC.

Combining their medical knowledge with an in-depth understanding of Oracle tools, these Oracle scientists search for important facts within these huge databases, a task that would be virtually impossible without tools such as Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Data Mining.

For another example, Dr. Carolyn Hamm at the Walter Reed's decision support center, uses Oracle technology to quickly identify statistically significant heuristics (also called "rules of thumb") that apply of their universe of patients, and uses Oracle tools to generalize her findings to treatment regimens anywhere across the globe.

Dr. Hamm is the author of the forthcoming book "Oracle Data Mining", the first books of its kind to explain how Oracle tools are being used to help save lives:

It's nice to see a commercial vendor like Oracle investing millions of dollars to develop tools that promise to improve the lives of people everywhere.

Reader comments

If you want a good article on saving lives with Oracle, look at what Cerner corp out of Kansas City is doing.  Their software uses the oracle database, and does the full range of drug interaction checking, as well as medical condition checking, and even ordering tests. 

It even has a rules system that watches for interrelated results and automatically recommends further tests to order based on the results of earlier tests.  It does a lot more then Oracle's product ever
dreamed of.

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Oracle ACE
'If at first you don't succeed, don't take up skydiving.'

 

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