Informatica Solutions for Life Sciences
Integrating Disparate Systems to Manage Information Risk
Intellectual property is the most valuable asset for life sciences organizations-and the potential for mishandling it is their greatest risk. Part of the impetus to manage information risk is to prevent fraud and reduce costs incurred while operating in a heavily regulated environment. Today, however, even more risk lies in possible non-compliance with government regulations, such as the Data Protection Acts in Europe, Sarbanes Oxley in the United States, as well as industry regulations, such as those imposed by the Federal Drug Administration and its counterparts in the European Union.
All of these regulations demand that organizations prove the accuracy and authenticity of their data, as well as how it was derived and on what information conclusions were based. Should a legal action or regulator's inquiry arise, the more easily a life sciences company can supply information that demonstrates compliance, the better its chance of being viewed as compliant-and escaping further scrutiny or legal action. Yet few life sciences organizations know the content of their data. This makes it virtually impossible for them to produce requested data, let along show where it came from to document its authenticity.
Helping to Achieve Regulatory Compliance
Life science industries deal with many different types of data, from knowledge management and database systems through specialized applications for informatics and sequencing, proteomics through computational chemistry to data visualization. Much of the data comes from sources outside the enterprise and is generally found in heterogeneous, often proprietary formats that stand in the way of easy data sharing. Proving compliance with regulations requires rapidly understanding data and integrating data from disparate systems into a single enterprise resource.
Informatica offers a flexible and efficient data integration platform, based on a service-oriented architecture that is flexible and easily deployed with smart shared data services to help eliminate data silos and simplify integration efforts. The Informatica platform enables life sciences organizations to solve the challenges of compliance by allowing them to:
- Understand the nature and content of data. The comprehensive metadata tagging capability of Informatica's products enables life sciences organizations to understand the nature and type of business and technical data they are storing, where it comes from, and how it has been used.
- Establish a single source of the truth. The Informatica platform allows life sciences organizations to create a data warehouse that can extract a copy of information from their operational IT systems and pool it into a data repository, which holds all different types of information in a common format regardless of the source. This provides a single trustworthy source of information for use with any business intelligence or analytic application.
- Rapidly access data. The Informatica platform, with its ability to create data objects, including metadata, allows information to be stored and rapidly accessed in a meaningful format, giving life sciences organizations insight into their compliance. In addition, Informatica software allows for reuse of data objects, enabling a company to tweak or re-deploy existing architectures, data services, and objects to serve new purposes without having to invest significant development time or resources.
The benefits of the Informatica platform extend beyond regulatory compliance. Life sciences organizations can also use the platform to achieve:
- Greater efficiency in clinical trials through better data security and knowledge sharing.
- Better control over the supply chain by providing a clearer picture of demand, tighter control over inventory and transportation costs, confidence that customers are receiving the same drug that left the factory, and the ability to audit the supply chain to better respond to FDA drug warnings or withdrawals.
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