The Pharmaceutical Industry has been undergoing a major transformation since the heady days of 'big pharma' in the 1970s and 80s. Patent expiry, the rise of generics, and the decline of the blockbuster drug have all changed the landscape over the last 10-15 years. It's an environment where products can take 10 years or more to come to market, billions are spent on research and development, jobs are being shed in the western pharma homelands and regulators and the public are more demanding than ever. So what part is Knowledge Management playing and going to play in this vital international industry? Knowledge Management (KM) has many facets from providing comprehensive knowledge bases for workers, through the sharing of advice and problem solving, to providing an environment for innovation and change. This book, focusing on research and development, and manufacturing-based companies, explores how a range of techniques and approaches have been applied in the unique environment of the Pharmaceutical Industry, and examine how it can help the industry in the 21st century. Whilst the book is centered on the Pharmaceutical Industry, its objective will be to discuss and demonstrate how Knowledge Management can be applied in a variety of environments, and with a range of cultural issues. KM practitioners, and potential practitioners, both within and outside the Pharmaceutical Industry, will be able to gain valuable guidance and advice from both the examples of good practice and the lessons learned by the authors and contributors.

This book addresses the rapidly emerging field of Knowledge Management in the pharmaceutical, medical devices and medical diagnostics industries. In particular, it explores the role that Knowledge Management can play in ensuring the delivery of safe and effective products to patients. The book also provides good practice examples of how the effective use of an organisation’s knowledge assets can provide a path towards business excellence.

The healthcare industry produces a constant flow of data, creating a need for deep analysis of databases through data mining tools and techniques resulting in expanded medical research, diagnosis, and treatment. Data Mining and Medical Knowledge Management: Cases and Applications presents case studies on applications of various modern data mining methods in several important areas of medicine, covering classical data mining methods, elaborated approaches related to mining in electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram data, and methods related to mining in genetic data. A premier resource for those involved in data mining and medical knowledge management, this book tackles ethical issues related to cost-sensitive learning in medicine and produces theoretical contributions concerning general problems of data, information, knowledge, and ontologies.

Comprehensively presents the foundations and leading application research in medical informatics/biomedicine. The concepts and techniques are illustrated with detailed case studies. Authors are widely recognized professors and researchers in Schools of Medicine and Information Systems from the University of Arizona, University of Washington, Columbia University, and Oregon Health & Science University. Related Springer title, Shortliffe: Medical Informatics, has sold over 8000 copies The title will be positioned at the upper division and graduate level Medical Informatics course and a reference work for practitioners in the field.