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PROBLEM: Among the unique challenges facing educational institutions in the early years of the twenty-first century is how best to serve a diverse user base with new technologies in a time of tight budgetary restrictions. While many businesses in the private sector can focus on the

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

handful of software solutions that fit their particular needs, colleges, universities, and other institutions must attempt to integrate large-scale solutions for the entire campus community with a myriad of applications and business methodologies used at the individual department level.

To make this

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

mandate even more challenging, many state-funded educational institutions are facing belt-tightening measures that put a cramp on their information technology budget and force them to focus on crucial services, often at the expense of innovation. Consolidating core software functions and getting exi

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

ting and new applications to "play well together" makes perfect sense in such a climate.

While the current economic slowdown may have stalled some bold and exciting plans for the future, it also may provide a chance to clean up some of the sloppiness left behind after ten years of rapid, often direc

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

tionless, growth.

SOLUTION: The needs of each department of an educational institution are so diverse that it would be foolhardy to try to develop one application to meet them all. However, there is no reason the basic functions common to all departments, the "business infrastructu

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

e," cannot be tapped by each department for its own purposes. The salient reasons for developing on a common framework include:

Efficiency -- The integration of accounting and billing methods allows departments that use their own software for business services to directly tap the data provid

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

ed by a centralized entity that provides services to the entire campus, such as a Financial Services office. By the same token, a common platform such as the web allows a facilities management department, for instance, to provide utility billing and work order information to departments in a paperles

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

s format, as well as to streamline common services such as work order submission.

Security -- Every application with sensitive or private information requires a database to store user logins, passwords, and permissions. The ability to use one central database to store this information for ma

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

y applications means each user need only remember one login and password, and authentication can be handled in one place, meaning fewer access points need to be secured.

Interdisciplinary study -- Institutions are beginning to recognize the value of linking different disciplines for a common

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

good. For instance, a researcher into online security issues might find it useful to share information with a behavioral scientist to understand why people are willing or unwilling to provide credit card information online. Or an historian might find it useful to plumb data from a molecular biologis

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

's lab to understand the dispersion patterns of ancient human populations.METHODS: Fortunately, technology can be used to ease many of the unique headaches universities, colleges, and academies must endure. The emergence of middleware solutions using standard data formats

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

like XML can be powerful tools in the right hands. While the IT department for the institution itself must provide some support for these methodologies, there are concrete solutions individual departments and other organizations on campus can use to get themselves up to speed:

The Central Au

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

thentication Service (CAS) -- Developed at Yale University, CAS is an open source method for authenticating users in one place for many different applications. Integrating existing applications into a CAS solution allows users to provide their login and password combination once, and these credential

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

are passed to every application the user accesses during that browser session, including uPortal, webmail, and custom software. Applications large and small can capitalize on this technology with a good developer and a little help from the central IT department.

Adopting a web-based interfa

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

ce -- The proliferation of web technology is approaching a level of sophistication that will eventually rival that of desktop technology for even heavily data-intensive applications. While we may never live in a web-only world, it's not too soon to capitalize on the unique advantages a web-based appl

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

cation or a web interface for an existing non-web application provides. Aside from making the application available to any machine with a web browser (the other kind are very hard to find these days), a web solution in many cases replaces paper and phone calls as a means of doing business.

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

aximizing existing assets -- While it would be nice in the best of all possible worlds to replace an aging application with a brand-spanking new one, it is not always feasible. Under tight budgets, getting the most out of existing applications is often the right way to go. While not all applications

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

are worth salvaging, a surprising number can be retooled or replaced one piece at a time, keeping the underlying data structure intact until it makes sense to upgrade to newer back-end technologies. Additionally, even legacy databases can often be coaxed into providing their essential data in a usabl

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

format, even if it has to be converted from raw text. Often, such a conversion leads to a streamlined data structure after columns and tables that are no longer used have been dropped.SUMMARY: While universities face a set of challenges rare outside of academia, highly di

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

verse user bases and shrinking budgets need not mean substandard application design. An intelligent mix of integration, centralization, and the incremental replacement of outdated technologies can ease these challenges and allow an educational institution to focus on its primary objective, to educate

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

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Change is critical to your success and happiness. I cringe to think what might happen in our lives if we don't allow ourselves the opportunity to make the appropriate changes. Sure, we can pretend that we don't need to change, that there is nothing wrong with our lives. Then, however, we soon forget the consequences of not taking action and making the changes we know we need to make.

Learning to innovate involves doing things differently. Not just from how you have done things before, but possibly how other people have done things as well. What are the barriers that prevent us from innovating?

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