The Patient Equation

13The Importance of Collaboration

You can't do it alone. For us to scale progress to the world, companies in health care simply can't remain in their individual silos. Data needs to be combined to realize its full potential, which means players across the spectrum must work together. Finding, developing, testing, and marketing the right treatments for patients requires a coordinated effort. Companies must share data, talk to each other, and collaborate in order to thrive.

Take an eye drop developer, for instance. In the past, that company needed only to be concerned about eye drops, to some extent at least. Now, that same company ought to be sharing data with ophthalmologists and endocrinologists, with chronic care diabetes drug manufacturers, with players across the spectrum. Easier said than done, of course. We talked already about good data versus bad data—one principle of having good data is that it's in a form that's able to be shared in the first place. Standardizing data is obviously of key importance for collaboration, because we can't join forces if our information can't interconnect. But data standardization isn't enough. We need the willingness to share—and not just the willingness, but the realization that it is an imperative, and that cooperation will lift us all to greater heights in our quest to help patients and to create solutions that drive our organizations forward.

We need each other's data in order to enrich our models, to understand how our products and ...