On the road ...

POST ON softwareblogs.intel.com :

If you talk to a pharmaceutical industrial, the conversation will certainly end up talking about drug counterfeiting. And let's admit it, that's an alarming problem for all the potential patients we are.

Various technologies and solutions have been demonstrated over the years, but this is a huge problem involving large-scale logistics, information security and far-reaching consequences. We are talking about a billion of boxes moving all over the world independently, with a box level traceability, highly sensitive patient information at the end of the chain, and that's just for one single pharmaceutical company.

So how does Intel become implicated in the problem? Well if you scrutinise the problem closely from the software developer point of vue, you will discover a number of daily routine similarities, even if the software represents only a small part of the problem.

Traceability means moving from a product to an information, and sharing it : after all that's the software developer's job. Worried about how the system could scale and how to get a good response time ? that's an application engineer's daily job. Or perhaps how hackers would react to your information sharing methods? let's gather 10 Intel engineers and ask them how they would break the system !

So I ended up writing a proposal this summer, brainstorming with colleagues to find and improve the weak points, trying to see how a real life pharmacist would like to interact with the system, how a hacker could break into the system, how as a patient I could have my answer ... and coding a prototype using a Medical Clinical Assistant and server.

We are now opening the discussion and meeting with the pharmaceutical industry to try to improve the proposition.

The document is freely released under an open source licence, the "GNU Free Documentation License" so feel free to add to it and send me feedback. The document is available as a PDF attached to this post :

SLIDES - BEAMER

SLIDES - PRINT

@+, Paul.