Front Office Box

We have more than our fair share of these challenges. Happily social media provides a new platform on which we can get those ideas some air time. It still isn’t easy but it’s a heck of a lot easier than door knocking or working the phones.

Our main challenge at the moment is developing a business for a new science -worse – a new science in medicine. Health care is a sector which adopts new ideas at the pace glaciers melt. Those guys measure progress in decades.

Our technology uses Bayesian Artificial Neural Networks to anticipate something going wrong for brain injured patients during intensive care. Our leadership team is stacked with Phd’s, most of whom spend their days cutting bits out of people’s brains – seriously intelligent people. The research is funded by the EU under FP7 to the tune of $2 millions. In Europe alone their are 1 million patients suffering with problems we’re solving, each year. Estimates suggest in the USA there are 2 million.

Right minded people will think this is a slam dunk, but life is rarely that simple. It turns out nobody wants to know. The European business support agencies have the heads up their asses (guess that’s a common problem worldwide. Venture Capitalists are only interested in projects introduced by their mates. Medical device manufacturers have been so successful (on our money) in their cosy monopolies they’re only interested in their own ideas. Even the scientists are only interested in their reputations and the next grant application.

This is against a background of potentially saving the EU €5 billion in health care costs each year.

So what are we doing about it? We can’t ignore it – too many lives at risk and too much money to be made.

We’re working the web. Google Reader keeps us in touch with the news. We grab relevant bits and post in our blog. We grab names of the big company execs and will go after them through LinkedIn. We have an interim strategy which provides remote hosting of data and analysis tools for clinical researchers. We’re thinking about open sourcing our BANN technology, and even using it for contract research – discovering stuff in people’s data they can’t find on their own.

Web 2.0 is making all this possible. I can’t think of any other environment in which we could get ideas out there and engage all of those people interested in the same stuff.

So in this case social media is a fundamental element in our ability to get new ideas across.

Will it work? Jiggered if I know! But there has to be a chance. We adopted the same concepts(ish) with Front Office Box and now we have users in 30 countries around the world.

If you’re interested in knowing more about what we have and how we’re going about it you can find us at Avantrasara, and we’ll keep up a running commentary on how we’re doing here in this blog.