Evolution Of Bio-Clinical Laboratories

With the changes and evolution in the medical and clinical landscape, there came upon a well defined role for supervisors, directors, technologists, consultants in the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment of 1988. This act got enforced in order to indicate the training, qualifications and the certifications that might be essential for any more willing to make a career in the domain of bio-clinical laboratory. However, there have been several signs that the need for qualification as a laboratory professional in the forthcoming days might be minimized to a stage that will be unlikely to commensurate with the high - end practice.

 

Though this remains, just an observations eminent clinical research organization (CRO) in India has been focusing on improving the conditions of their bio-clinical laboratories, that in most cases acts as a Central Laboratory. It forms the very nucleus of medical studies, clinical trial, experiments and multiple external proficiency testing programs with national and global laboratories to retain excellent levels of quality control.


Standard to high-end bio clinical laboratories of famous CRO’s are generally equipped with state-of-the-art infrastructure, a wide selection of high-end devices and immaculate logistics. This apart, the most crucial element in a bio clinical laboratory are its well trained and experienced medical technicians, who are supported by innovative technologies in the new age Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) for transferring online data, guaranteeing shorter turnaround time with high levels of quality and reliable services. Simultaneously, the bio clinical laboratories today are completely equipped to conduct a wide range of investigations that comprise the following:


* Hematology

* Urine Analysis

* Coagulation Studies

* Biochemistry

* Clinical Pathology

* Endocrinology

* Serology

* Inflammatory/Immune markers

* Infectious Disease Markers

* Therapeutic Drug Monitoring

* Tumor Markers

* Lipid Profile

* Liver Function Test

* Anemia Profile

* Renal Profile

* Diabetic Profile

* Biomarkers

* Capabilities for other tests


The rise of health care expenses over the past few years has been the very basis of high revenue for both medical institution and bio clinical laboratories. While the state of reimbursement retained a sufficient differential over the operating expenses, the situation was one embraced by hospital administration and by operators of independent bio clinical laboratories. On the other hand the increasing percentage of human ailments propelled the medical professionals and institutes to bring about radical changes in the bio clinical laboratories so that it can help in discovering innovative treatment methods and come up with better drug development processes.


Read More About: Bioavailability, Bioequivalence, Clinical Pharmacokinetic

Recent Trends In Clinical Trials In India

Eminent medical experts had considered 2011 as a roller coaster ride for the Indian clinical research industry. The enthusiasm that sets in with India is gaining significance in the global biopharmaceutical landscape and the advent of robust innovation-led local industry got offset by a slowdown in the regulatory platform. Looking at the positive side, these challenges led the industry into action and was a catalyst for the industry, regulatory bodies and other main stakeholders to join hands on a shared environment to focus on essential issues pertaining to the medical field. All these led to even better developments in the year 2012.


It has been observed that the scope of the medical and clinical trial/research industry in India is vast and offers a great platform for clinical research organizations. The Indian clinical trial industry was evaluated to be at $485 million in 2010 by Frost & Sullivan with a 17 percent CGAR growth between the years 2009 and 2015. It has been estimated that this growth would be fouled by medical global giants as well as generic and innovative domestic enterprises who have experienced a quick growth over the past few years.


Furthermore, a huge and potential area of expansion is that of the biosimilar field, where a huge amount of unique and innovative research, development and experiments is going on in India. The potential for biosimilars sets up an enormous scope for the Biopharma organizations. However, contradictory to the development of progenitor biologic or generic versions of chemical based medication, the biosimilat developments are stated to be a complicated attempt that needs detailed planning, precision to make sure that of scheduled regulatory sanctions and optimal access to the market. As a result, the clinical development strategies need to concentrate on the patient selection and apt clinical endpoints. This serves as a scope for the clinical research organizations to join hands with Biopharma enterprises and assist them to go through the intricacies of the industry.


In the recent past, the Indian medical landscape has already started to witness alliances and partnerships between international CRO’s and other domestic Pharma players in the biosimilar vertical and this expected to grow all through 2012.  Other growing scope in India is the data-generated healthcare services that include Biostatistics, data management, medical writing, Pharmacovigilance, bioavalability and so on. IT capacities and the ability to comprehend and process data through analytics are both essential to the new age clinical trials.


Read More About: biometrics, Bioavailability, Clinical Pharmacokinetic, bio clinical laboratories

Automate and Manage Legal Hold Process

A legal hold is the process of preserving all forms of relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. Besides litigation, a legal hold can be issued as a result of audit, government investigation or other such matter. It is issued in order to avoid evidence spoliation. When a legal hold is initiated by a notice or communication from legal counsel to an organization, the organization must at once suspend the normal processing of records, such as archived media, backup tape recycling, and other storage and management of documents and information. The legal hold that originally existed for paper documents was extended to electronically stored information (ESI) through recent amendments to the United States Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP).


A legal hold is a serious issue and therefore enterprises, corporations, law firms, and government agencies must put in place an effective solution to automate and manage their legal hold process. The following are some of the aspects that a legal hold application must include.


Hold Notices

It should create and sent hold notices quickly to relevant custodians and system administrators via email. Different notices should be sent to custodians and system administrators, streamlining the notification process. Notices should be sent immediately or scheduled for delivery.


Reminders

It should be able to schedule for delivery reminder email notices to non-responsive custodians, eliminating the need for manual follow-up.


Escalations

It should be able to schedule for delivery escalation email notices to a custodian’s manager if a custodian is not responsive. This simplifies the legal hold process while maximizing compliance.


Automated Tracking and Reporting

It should offer administrators immediate visibility into the status of all legal hold notices across all cases through a single pane of glass.


Survey Response Report

It should automatically capture survey responses and make it immediately available for analysis both in a summarized format and by the individual custodian via easy-to-read charts and graphs.


Custodian Audit Report

It should track every legal hold action, such as hold notice, response, confirmation, escalation, and release, and make it available via an exportable report, thus creating a complete and detailed audit trail.


With such software, enterprises can minimize the risk of sanctions while providing the highest level of defensibility across the entire ediscovery lifecycle.


 

Read more on - electronic discovery, electronic disclosure 

 

 

 

Streamline Your Litigation Process With e-Discovery Solutions

In today’s highly competitive and aggressive market place, a skill that can distinguish a high-performing company from other market players is its litigation management. This particular skill is crucial for offering a value-added proposition that a leading enterprise must offer to its clients and end users. In this regard, selecting an effective counsel is a challenging task of quality litigation management and is driven less by objective evaluation and more by efficient marketing of law firms.

The fact is that while the counsel can be evaluated by objective mediums, certain organizations carry that on in a meaningful manner. Hence, as a result the counsel selection is dependant of the risk aversion policies and career security. For the claim professional, this indicates that the main generator for counsel selection has the desire to avert being second guessed by supervision when the case’s result is negative. However, you can resort to selecting a counselor can opt in for other means for an efficient litigation management. In the recent past, most enterprises are willing to optimize their electronic discovery process staying consistent with other standard business procedures for reducing the percentage of risk and money they generally spend on litigation.

Hence, most companies have resorted to ediscovery litigation support solutions that offer the following benefits and services:

  • Helps in consolidating the overall e-discovery process for recognizing and legal hold through analysis and production into a single application, assisting the iterative nature of e-discovery.
  • Reduce the expensive and time consuming data movement between various disparate tools
  • Lesser processing expenses and time up to 80 percent
  • Minimized review volume up to 90 percent
  • Helps to attain quick insight into the concept and keyword search results to prepare better for the keyword negotiations at the time of the Meet and Confer
  • Helps to perform early case assessments (ECA) to the scope litigation timeline and expense
  • Recognize the main custodians and significant evidence to cater to court appointed and FRCP deadlines
  • Offers complete transparency and lifecycle reporting to make sure the defensibility of the ediscovery process and minimize the chances of court sanctions

Top e-discovery solution providers offer litigation support that helps to resolve some of the acute challenges of litigation today and simplifies the overall e-discovery life cycle with a single, easy-to-use application that minimizes cost, time and the intricacies of electronic discovery.

Read more on - electronic evidence discovery, electronic disclosure

Social Analytics to Increase Your Reach in the Social Platform

Customers have using social tools to communicate, shop, research and discover, consequently making entrepreneurs shift the way they run their business. It is a well-known fact that social media produces more information in a short period of time than what was earlier possible in the entire world a few decades ago. Organizations have begun to understand the immense intelligence that can be obtained by looking at millions of conversations that are taking place in the open, between those engaging in social media.

 

Most enterprises are primarily relying on web statistics and click-through rates on media campaigns to judge the health of their brands in the online world. And social analytics offers the latest paradigm for determining interactive marketing, expanding your reach, enhancing retention, and eventually, driving more revenue. It has therefore become important to evaluate and optimize your social marketing efforts with comprehensive, actionable data. Measure engagement for marketing initiatives within your brand globally and across social networks in real-time.

 

With effective Social media analytics tools , a business can bring you closer to your customer, uncover untapped markets, and provide insight into your competitors. For this the social analytics tools need to overcome various challenges of social commerce and be equipped to capture the incredible volumes of data being produced by social networks and be able to quickly surface the valuable insights. There must have seamless automation, to analyze the data, apply business rules, and push out new campaigns or updates in near real-time. The right social analytical tool helps to provide the best direction and provides fast insights across all aspects of their reach, retention, and revenue campaigns.

 

The capacity to evaluate within social networks is facilitating a variety of interesting and helpful applications that can plug into social media networks and make use of the knowledge inside them. Look for a service provider who has the capacity to deliver a host of social analytics applications. The solution that you choose must be able to provide real time data and actionable insights to help you reach faster, smarter operating decisions. It must be fully enabled to provide quick results to ensure that businesses can track user behaviors in real-time and get immediate feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. With this information an enterprise is armed to optimize products, features, campaigns, and interactions on the fly.

 

With easy-to-use visualization interface with both trending views and drill-down capabilities, ensure that your advanced analytics solution provides faster insights into the key influences on your K-Factor and virality campaigns. Understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most impact revenues by investing in the right solution.

 

Learn more about : analytics for facebook

 

Reduce Phishing Threats with Effective Anti-Phishing Technologies

As one of the top cyber crime ploys impacting both consumers and businesses, Phishing has grown in volume and sophistication over the past several years. Phishing attacks use a combination of social engineering and technical spoofing techniques to persuade users into giving away sensitive information. A business has a lot at stake if it succumbs to these phishing tactics. Businesses have a lot of confidential data that need to be protected against any kind of data compromise.

 

Even as people controls are the main focus area in phishing attacks against unsuspecting users, enterprises need to ensure that the right phishing technology and process controls are deployed. Phishing has no doubt grown significantly in volume over the time becoming the most usual web threat today. Employees need to be vigilant and firms need to stay one step ahead of the innovations of the hackers and keep the employees informed. Adopting successful solutions depends on clearly understanding current and future threats.


While there are several solutions available to offer protection from technology attacks, the two most susceptible areas remain the people and process. Ideally a tactical Phishing attack specifically targets these two areas as attackers are well aware that these are the most difficult zones to guard. The most important protection against Phishing is constant vigilance and moderate skepticism. Employee awareness programs and anti-Phishing technologies offer only a limited protection against such attacks.


Organizations need to look beyond traditional technology controls, and look to continuing education and awareness to fight Phishing attacks. Preventing Phishing attacks can be an arduous challenge for organizations as these attacks cannot be controlled by merely implementing filters and firewalls. Countermeasures, like reliable anti Phishing software need to be implemented to tackle the increasing technical sophistication of criminals conducting Phishing scams exploiting human vulnerabilities.


Successful Phishing protection and control needs to include law enforcement and employees of targeted businesses so that they are able to recognize scams. Enterprises must invest in reliable anti Phishing software solutions that deploys automated processes and provide customized solutions after a careful evaluation of the factors that affect your business operations. The software facilitates calculation of phishing risks. These tools also conduct mock phishing attacks  and  provides statistics on user behavior, measures security awareness among employees, identifies data leakage, assesses Data Loss Prevention (DLP) programs and tests the incident response program.


Protection from phishing is a must today, making it imperative for organizations to arm employees against any malicious phishing attacks, create a prioritized action plan and alleviate possible threats.


Read More About: anti phishing tool ,  Simulated phishing attack

Useful Social Monitoring With Social Analytics

Social media has evolved manifold. It is indeed much more than few idle tweets or random likes and shares. Responses in social media create a story, whether it is about a brand, product, service or a consumer experience. Simply put, it’s about gathering perception and social engagement. Therefore, it is essential to invest in social media monitoring tools for your brand.

 

As you saunter around the social media sphere you will come across numerous business houses and other brands using social media channels to interact with their consumers. This is effective as it makes way for real-time communication and offers an open platform for the online audience to interact with others. Enterprises are leaving no chance to capitalize on this scope to leverage their brand image. They engage their audiences in conversations, news feeds, blogs, and polls to monitor the product and service trends. The inputs gathered from these interactions offer actionable insights to enterprises. SMB’s or startup ventures generally take time to develop brand loyalty unlike the MNC’s. Therefore, today they too are making the best use of social media to make their presence felt amidst their target audience.

 

Whether your enterprise is a startup venture, an SMB, a MNC already enjoys a positive brand image or yours is a sole proprietorship firm, everyone can make use social media monitoring to their benefit. To get started, you need to select a well-known social networking site that would cater to your business goals and objectives. Post that you can go about monitoring the conversations in the social space to get the pulse of your online audience i.e. what keeps them connected, what repulses them, the kind of content they expect, the kind of online activity they participate most and the like. It is essential that you give importance in setting up your social profile and instill trust amongst online members while interacting. With relevant posts and articles you can add value to your followers timeline, which when appreciated by them is shared with the audience at large.

 

Finally, it is advisable that you invest in advanced social media analytics tools offered by well-known solution providers to reap positive benefits of social networking and monitoring. Innovative social analytic tools help you to track down the responses of your online audience and competitors keeping you updated on the market. This apart, it offers meaningful insights boosts up your online marketing and branding campaigns.

 

Read more about: engagement tracking

 

Phishing Attacks And The Way To Combat Them

It has been noted that most Phishing attacks occur on compromised and corrupt web servers, where the phishers and third party intruders can place their phishing web pages unknown to the site operators. This method helps the phishers to gain free hosting and complicates the take-down initiatives, as a suspending domain name or a hosting account can also disable the resolution of the original user’s site.

 

That is not all. It has also been discovered that approximately 24 percent of Phishing attacks ( according to the Anti-Phishing Work Group) can result in an avalanche. The Phishing site that is located at the domains of these hackers often targets individual users, employees, on-line services, financial institutions where malware and other forms of Phishing attacks are disseminated through social engineering. These phishing attacks comprise of domain names that are already registered by the phishers and set up on the name servers that are managed by the phishers and are hosted on a quick-flux network of an apparently corrupted consumer-level machines. This quick-flux hosting results in making mitigation initiatives even more complicated, calling the Internet Service Provider to offer a site. Else an IP blocked is not effective until the domain name is suspended at the registry level.


Innovative Anti-Phishing Solutions


The modern anti Phishing tool software that is provided by top notch service providers gives detailed statistics on the end - user behavior, analyzes security awareness present amongst the employees and identifies all the possible data leakage and assesses  Data Loss Prevention. They further scrutinize the incident response program and post this examination they come up with a customized email that is sent to every employee, updating him/her about the responses they gave.


Simultaneously, the advanced phishing protection solutions also offer an e-learning module that assists in educating the employees about the security awareness. Few other benefits of these solutions are as follows:-


* Assists the organizations to estimate the possible threats related to phishing

* Provides elastic reporting capabilities and efficiently integrates them back into the organization’s main performance-indicator framework

* Provides a detailed “road map" solution emphasizing on phishing awareness and training within an organization

* Helps in recognizing weakness within people, process and technology links

* Helps in prioritizing remediation initiatives through an effective benchmarking and maturity evaluation

* Helps to maximize employee awareness and knowledge to help guard sensitive information


Therefore, an appropriate phishing protection can detect security threats for that are present in a business. Phishing is a by-product of social engineering and is looked up on a criminal strategy that implements technical deception to rob individuals of their personal data, financial data and other identity details. With an advanced anti-phishing solution you can alleviate the same efficiently.


Read More About: protection from phishing, Simulated phishing attack

Importance of Computer Software Certifications

Certification, often used in the professions of software engineering and information technology, is an assessment process that helps to recognize an individual's knowledge, skills, and competency in a particular specialty. Normally certifications are valid for a specific period and hence need to be renewed periodically. After the certification process, the individuals earn a credential, which is listed after their names.


In today’s competitive professional environment, computer software certifications are important for people pursuing careers in computer technology. Software certification helps professionals to kick-start or expand their professional career as many corporate management consider it as a benchmark for recognizing the potential in an individual. The certification also helps to assess the expertise of new professionals in handling the present technical challenges. Let’s see how software certification programs help graduates, professionals, and employers.


  • Graduates

Certification programs help graduates to not only bridge the gap between their education and work requirements but also verify their understanding of fundamental software development practices.


  • Professionals

As for professionals, certification programs clearly substantiate their proficiency of established software development practices and demonstrate their commitment and professionalism.


  • Employers

Certification programs help employers to standardize their software development practices and protect their investment in a competent and proficient workforce.


Certifications are of several types namely

 
  • Vendor Specific Certifications

Vendor specific certifications include those sponsored by vendors for instance the Apple certification program, the Microsoft Certified Professional program and the Cisco Career Certifications program.


  • Third Party / Vendor Neutral Certifications

It refers to those certifications issued by independent, third party commercial organizations who do not owe allegiance to any specific vendor. Secure Web-Application Development Awareness courseby SCIPP International, Microsoft Office Specialist and IC3 certification by Certiport belong to this category.


  • General Certifications

The Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and the Certified Computing Professional (CCP) by the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals are all general certifications.


Hence, there are hundreds of certification programs to choose from. In order to understand the certification program further, let’s look at some programs.


Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP)

It is an ISO accredited professional certification in software engineering to mid-career software development professionals. To be eligible, the candidate must have a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution and at least four years (about 7,000 hrs) experience in software engineering/development. The CSDP examination tests candidates' proficiency in internationally accepted, industry-standard software engineering practices.


Certified Software Development Associate (CSDA)

The CSDA is for the graduating software engineers and early-career software professionals and is the first step towards becoming a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP).


Know more about - IEEE Computer Society

Value of Software Certification for the Software Engineer

Technology and its innovations have made a mark in today’s business world. With both small and medium enterprises and large corporate house so dependent on the technology and computers for a networked environment, the need for skilled, competent, software engineering professionals is greater than ever.

 

The Software Engineering field though relatively new as far as technological advancements go, has today advanced with scientific approaches.  As  programming languages  evolved  from assembly languages to a more methodical object oriented language, the proliferation of  application software in the late 70’s to early 80’s, software development has come a long way.  ‘Software engineering’ was first used in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference, to provoke thought regarding "software crisis" prevalent at the time. Software engineering (SE) can be defined as a systematic approach to the analysis, design, assessment, implementation, testing, and maintenance and reengineering of software.

 

Nevertheless, to become a software engineer, the knowledge of programming is a pre-requisite. Further, computer societies expect strict adherence to the ISO/IEC technical reports 19759:2004 which categorically states that to be a professional in the field of software engineering requires the mastering of the knowledge through a four year graduate software engineering experience.  With a number of universities offering the graduate engineering program and information technology training, the computer societies have laid down an international standard curriculum to be followed by the universities.

 

However in a technologically enhanced world, with an increasing need for skilled, competent, and ardent software development professionals software certification has some major advantages. For the graduates, this helps to bridges the gap between your education and work requirements, whereas for the professionals, this confirms proficiency standards of established software development practices. For the employers too, this helps to make up a proficient workforce.

 

Globalization has resulted in migration of software development activities from the developed to the developing countries and has also brought in challenges of  time zone differences and the quality of  products developed. The advent of software development life cycles and other developments have helped experts in the field of software engineering to enhance their reliability and quality of products and services. However, with the changing technological trends, more software development platforms became accessible to the software engineer. Under such circumstances of increased competition and global markets, software certifications are very valuable.

 

Various professional societies offer certification courses on general software engineering skills for a certified software development professional or even an entry–level certification program for a development associate. Further, institutions also offer software certifications on specific technologies such as security, process improvement, software architecture which are in great demand. Such software certifications oriented towards specific technologies are also at times sponsored by leading IT giants.

 

Learn more about : Online Digital Library