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In case you’ve missed the memo, here’s a sobering reality check that highlights the importance of movie in today’s mobile very first, customer-centric economy:

Toughly one hundred of the top five hundred corporations worldwide will be using movie talk for customer-facing interactions by 2018, according to Gartner research.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to use movie talk for each and everything you do. It also doesn’t mean that all businesses are right for movie talk. However, it does mean that forward-thinking businesses are driving competitive advantage through movie talk use today.

So why is movie talk right for your business? Let’s take a look:

1. Face-to-face movie talk dramatically improves customer service

As the above stat highlights, movie talk plays a gigantic role in customer service. However many people have made a big fuss out of self-serve support options, and there’s some truth to the fact that customers would rather treat their own support questions if they can, Gartner predicts that a third of all customer service interactions will still require live agent support in 2017.

Movie talk works well for this interaction because it helps you identify issues quicker through show-and-tell methods while building rapport with agents. Agents can guide customers through complicated or confusing instructions and create the sense of presence that was lost when in-store staff began substituting online shopping carts.

Consumers want it, too: harshly 36% of consumers said they would like to use movie talk with customer support, according call center solutions provider Talkdesk.

Two. Movie talk will increase your sales

Consumers don’t want sales reps hovering over them as they consider a purchase, but they do want help when needed. Movie talk can help you strike the right balance inbetween buyers just browsing your products and having their questions answered before purchasing something.

The value of talk is proven, with toughly 90% of customers telling live talk is helpful, according to an ATG Global Consumer Trends examine. What’s more, an emarketer.com survey found that 63% of consumers were more likely to comeback to a website that suggested live talk.

Movie is the next evolution of live talk. It speeds up interaction with your company and brings a face to the sales process, and it permits agents to gauge interest and pick up subtle sales cues through assets language and voice inflection. With screen-sharing, agents also can see exactly what your consumers are browsing during the interaction.

Three. Movie talk can greatly cut down on expenses

There are two sides to the cost savings that you can reap from using movie talk: customer-facing cost reductions and internal cost savings from diminished travel expenses.

In the contact center, there is a lot of emphasis placed on very first call resolution. With good reason, too: Customers who don’t get their issues addressed will call again, raising support costs. Failed customer service opportunities also cost sales and lose customers, which hit the bottom line of a business.

Movie talk increases the chance that a customer will leave an interaction successfully due in part to the visual information and communication from the agents answering their questions. This means that you will have lower contact center costs.

At the same time, movie talk cuts costs internally through the reduction of travel expenses. Costly sales meetings can be diminished by substituting some of these meetings with movie calls, and internal meetings conducted over group movie talk can greatly reduce the need for bringing together remote teams.

Four. Employee training and collaboration make a fat leap forward

Movie talk not only cuts your costs by requiring less internal face-to-face meetings, it also lowers the bar for these meetings. Instead of using costly in-person meetings, movie talk opens up lines of communication by making it effortless for quick, pointed “virtual” meetings.

An internal movie talk system helps employees collaborate better by making it effortless to visually share information and virtually stick their goes into some else’s cubicle for a quick question. Once established in a work culture, movie talk can substantially boost collaboration and information sharing for your company.

Furthermore, movie talk can help with training. Imagine a fresh employee still learning the ropes. Traditionally, this employee will detect business processes and best practices through trial and error. Instead, with movie talk, seasoned employees can more lightly serve as mentors and provide guidance when fresh employees have a question or need direction.

Five. Incorporating movie talk sets your business apart from your competition

While a fifth of top global businesses might be rolling out movie talk by 2018, right now most are not. This gives you the time to stand out among the crowd and differentiate your customer service like Amazon did with its Kindle e-readers and its in-app movie talk support, Mayday.

Customer support is more significant than ever, and suggesting effortless movie talk both pre- and post-sales can undoubtedly turn goes.

It also can help customers recall your brand. Only three percent of online shoppers recall text three days later, according to an extensive survey conducted by the Customer Care Institute. Movie talk is dramatically more memorable, however, since it engages customers on the human level; the Customer Care Institute found that over this same three-day period, those who chatted with a company by movie remembered the interaction 95% of the time.

Looking to stand out in the crowd? Use movie talk.

These benefits won’t matter if your movie isn’t reliable

That’s assuming your movie talk works reliably, however. As with any fresh technology, the satan is in the details.

Choose wisely when rolling out movie talk functionality, because many unified communications (UC) solutions don’t come with encryption or quality-of-service assures. For example, if a remote employee or a customer has a poor Internet connection, the movie talk will fail in most cases. This will nullify almost all of the benefits from movie talk and drive customers away.

According to Tony Zhao, CEO of Agora.io, “The big problem for effortless, hassle-free embedding of real-time communications within Internet-based applications is the lack of quality of practice (QoE). If connections are unreliable, voices keep cutting out, and movie pics break up, then people will not use these embedded real-time capabilities.”

This challenge does not mean that you should avoid movie talk, but it does stress the need for you to do some research and choose wisely when considering a software development kit (SDK) to integrate into your businesses communication strategies.

Movie talk is in the future for most businesses. And for those firms that are looking ahead and planning wisely, it also is a competitive advantage today.

Another big way to produce better customer satisfaction and higher sales is to align in-store and online sales processes. Learn more in Our Digital Planet: See It, Click It, Touch It, Buy It.

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About JT Ripton

JT Ripton is a freelance business and tech writer out of Tampa FL. JT likes to write to inform and intrigue

Convert Or Die: What Will You Do In The Digital Economy?

By now, most executives are keenly aware that the digital economy can be either an chance or a threat. The question is not whether they should engage their business in it. Rather, it’s how to pull out the power of digital technology while maintaining a healthy business, leveraging existing IT investments, and innovating without disrupting themselves.

Yet most of those executives are shying away from such a challenge. According to a latest investigate by MIT Sloan and Capgemini, only 15% of CEOs are executing a digital strategy, even however 90% agree that the digital economy will influence their industry. As these businesses overlook this reality, early adopters of digital transformation are achieving 9% higher revenue creation, 26% greater influence on profitability, and 12% more market valuation.

Why aren’t more leaders willing to convert their business and seize the chance of our hyperconnected world? The reaction is as plain as human nature. Innately, humans are awkward with the notion of switch. We even find convenience in stability and predictability. Unluckily, the digital economy is none of these – it’s prompt and always evolving.

Digital transformation is no longer an option – it’s the imperative

At this moment, we are witnessing an explosion of connections, data, and innovations. And even tho’ this hyperconnectivity has switched the game, customers are radically switching the rules – requesting plain, seamless, and personalized practices at every touch point.

Billions of people are using social and digital communities to provide services, share insights, and engage in commerce. All the while, fresh channels for engaging with customers are created, and fresh ways for making better use of resources are emerging. It is these communities that permit companies to not only give customers what they want, but also align efforts across the business network to maximize value potential.

To seize the opportunities ahead, businesses must go beyond sensors, Big Data, analytics, and social media. More significant, they need to reinvent themselves in a manner that is compatible with an increasingly digital world and its inhabitants (a.k.a. your consumers).

Here are a few companies that understand the importance of digital transformation – and are reaping the prizes:

1. Under Armour: No longer is this widely popular athletic brand just selling boots and apparel. They are connecting thirty eight million people on a digital platform. By focusing on this services side of the business, Under Armour is poised to become a lifestyle advisor and health consultant, using his product side as the enabler.

1. Port of Hamburg: Europe’s second-largest port is keeping carrier trucks and ships productive around the clock. By fusing facility, weather, and traffic conditions with vehicle availability and shipment schedules, the Port enlargened container treating capacity by 178% without expanding its physical space.

1. Haier Asia: This top-ranking multinational consumer electronics and home appliances company determined to disrupt itself before someone else did. The company used a two-prong treatment to digital transformation to create a service-based model to seize the potential of switching consumer behaviors and accelerate product development.

1. Uber: This startup darling is more than just a taxi service. It is converting how urban logistics operates through a technology trifecta: Big Data, cloud, and mobile.

1. American Society of Clinical Oncologists (ASCO): Even nonprofits can benefit from digital transformation. ASCO is converting care for cancer patients worldwide by consolidating patient information with its CancerLinQ. By unlocking skill and value from the 97% of cancer patients who are not involved in clinical trials, healthcare providers can drive better, more data-driven decision making and outcomes.

It’s time to take act

During the SAP Executive Technology Summit at SAP TechEd on October 19–20, an elite group of CIOs, CTOs, and corporate executives will gather to discuss the challenges of digital transformation and how they can solve them. With the freedom of open, candid, and interactive discussions led by SAP Board Members and senior technology leadership, delegates will exchange ideas on how to get on the right path while leveraging their existing technology infrastructure.

Stay tuned for off the hook insights from this invitation-only event in our next blog!

Scott Feldman is Global Head of the SAP HANA Customer Community at SAP. Connect with him on Twitter @sfeldman0.

Puneet Suppal drives Solution Strategy and Adoption (Customer Innovation & IoT) at SAP Labs. Connect with him on Twitter @puneetsuppal .

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About Scott Feldman and Puneet Suppal

Scott Feldman is the Head of SAP HANA International Customer Community. Puneet Suppal is the Customer Co-Innovation & Solution Adoption Executive at SAP.

What Is Digital Transformation?

Achieving quantum leaps through disruption and using data in fresh contexts, in ways designed for more than just Generation Y — indeed, the digital transformation affects us all. It’s time for a detailed look at its key aspects.

Data finding its way into fresh settings

Archiving all of a company’s internal information until the end of time is generally a good idea, as it gives the boss the security that nothing will be lost. Meantime, enabling him or her to create bar graphs and pie charts based on sales trends – preferably in real time, of course – is even better.

But the best script of all is when the boss can incorporate data from outer sources. All of a unexpected, information on factors as seemingly mundane as the weather commence helping to improve interpretations of fluctuations in sales and to make precise modifications to the company’s offerings. When the gusts of autumn begin to suck, for example, energy providers scale back solar production and crank up their windmills. Here, outer data provides a foundation for processes and decisions that were previously unattainable.

Quantum leaps possible through disruption

While these advancements involve switches in existing workflows, there are also much more radical approaches that eschew conventional structures entirely.

“The aggressive use of data is converting business models, facilitating fresh products and services, creating fresh processes, generating greater utility, and ushering in a fresh culture of management,” states Professor Walter Brenner of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, regarding the effects of digitalization.

Harnessing these benefits requires the application of innovative information and communication technology, especially the kind termed “disruptive.” A finish departure from existing structures may not necessarily be the actual aim, but it can occur as a consequence of this process.

Having had to contend with “only” one fresh technology at a time in the past, be it PCs, SAP software, SQL databases, or the Internet itself, companies are now facing an array of concurrent topics, such as the Internet of Things, social media, third-generation e-business, and tablets and smartphones. Professor Brenner thus believes that every good — and perhaps disruptive — idea can result in a “quantum leap in terms of data.”

Products and services shaped by customers

It has already been almost seven years since the release of an app that enables customers to order and pay for taxis. Primarily introduced in Berlin, Germany, mytaxi makes it possible to avoid waiting on hold for the next phone representative and pay by credit card while providing drivers greater independence from taxi dispatch centers. In addition, analyses of user data can lead to the creation of fresh services, such as for people who consistently order taxis at around the same time of day.

“Successful models concentrate on providing utility to the customer,” Professor Brenner explains. “In the beginning, at least, everything else is secondary.”

In this regard, the private taxi agency Uber is a fair bit more radical. It bypasses the entire taxi industry and hires private individuals interested in making themselves and their vehicles available for rails on the Uber platform. Similarly, Airbnb runs a platform travelers can use to book private accommodations instead of hotel rooms.

Long-established companies are also undergoing profound switches. The German publishing house Axel Springer SE, for example, has acquired a number of startups, launched an online dating platform, and released an app with which users can collect points at retail. Chairman and CEO Matthias Döpfner also has an interest in getting the company’s newspapers and other periodicals back into the black based on payment models, of course, but these endeavors are somewhat at odds with the traditional notion of publishing houses being involved solely in publishing.

The influence of digitalization transcends Generation Y

Digitalization is effecting switches in almost every industry. Retailers will likely have no choice but to integrate their sales channels into an omnichannel treatment. Seeking to make their data services as attractive as possible, BMW, Mercedes, and Audi have joined compels to purchase the digital map service HERE. Mechanical engineering companies are outfitting their equipment with sensors to reduce downtime and achieve further product improvements.

“The specific potential and risks at mitt determine how and by what means each individual company approaches the subject of digitalization,” Professor Brenner exposes. The resulting services will ultimately benefit every customer – not just those belonging to Generation Y, who present a certain basic affinity for digital methods.

“Think of cars that notify the service center when their brakes or drive belts need to be substituted, suggest parking assistance, or even treat parking for you,” Brenner offers. “This can be a big help to elderly people in particular.”

Chief digital officers: team members, not miracle workers

Making the transition to the digital future is something that involves not only a CEO or a head of marketing or IT, but the entire company. However these individuals do play an significant role as proponents of digital models, it also takes more than just a chief digital officer alone.

For Professor Brenner, appointing a single person to the board of a DAX company to oversee digitalization is basically absurd. “Unless you’re talking about Da Vinci or Leibnitz born again, nobody could treat such a task,” he states.

In Brenner’s view, this is a topic for each and every department, and responsibilities should be assigned much like on a soccer field: “You’ve got a coach and the players – and the fans, as well, who are more or less what it’s all about.”

Here, the CIO neither competes with the CDO nor assumes an elevated position in the process of digital transformation. Implementing fresh databases like SAP HANA or Hadoop, leveraging sensor data in both technical and commercially viable ways, these are the tasks CIOs will face going forward.

“There are some fantastic jobs out there,” Brenner affirms.

Pic via Shutterstock

Article published by Andreas Schmitz. It originally appeared on SAP News Center and has been republished with permission.

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The Digitalist Magazine is your online destination for everything you need to know to lead your enterprise’s digital transformation.

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About Andreas Schmitz

Andreas Schmitz is a Freelance Journalist for SAP, covering a broad range of topics from big data to Internet of Things, HR, business innovation and mobile.

Heroes in the Race to Save Antibiotics

Last August, a woman arrived at a Reno, Nevada, hospital and told the attending doctors that she had recently returned from an extended tour to India, where she had cracked her right thighbone two years ago. The woman, who was in her 70s, had subsequently developed an infection in her hip and hip for which she was hospitalized in India several times. The Reno doctors recognized that the infection was serious—and the visit to India, where antibiotic-resistant bacteria runs rampant, raised crimson flags.

When none of the fourteen antibiotics the physicians used to treat the woman worked, they sent a sample of the bacterium to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for testing. The CDC confirmed the doctors’ worst fears: the woman had a class of microbe called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE). Carbapenems are a powerful class of antibiotics used as last-resort treatment for multidrug-resistant infections. The CDC further found that, in this patient’s case, the pathogen was impervious to all twenty six antibiotics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In other words, there was no cure.

This is just the latest alarming development signaling the end of the road for antibiotics as we know them. In September, the woman died from septic shock, in which an infection takes over and shuts down the body’s systems, according to the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Other antibiotic options, had they been available, might have saved the Nevada woman. But the solution to the larger problem won’t be a fresh drug. It will have to be an entirely fresh treatment to the diagnosis of infectious disease, to the use of antibiotics, and to the monitoring of antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—all enabled by fresh technology.

But that fresh technology is not being implemented rapid enough to prevent what former CDC director Tom Frieden has nicknamed nightmare bacteria. And the nightmare is becoming scarier by the year. A two thousand fourteen British investigate calculated that 700,000 people die globally each year because of AMR. By 2050, the global cost of antibiotic resistance could grow to ten million deaths and US$100 trillion a year, according to a two thousand fourteen estimate. And the rate of AMR is growing exponentially, thanks to the speed with which humans serving as hosts for these nasty bugs can budge among healthcare facilities—or countries. In the United States, for example, CRE had been seen only in North Carolina in 2000; today it’s nationwide.

Manhandle and overuse of antibiotics in healthcare and livestock production have enabled bacteria to both mutate and acquire resistant genes from other organisms, resulting in truly pan-drug resistant organisms. As ever-more powerful superbugs proceed to proliferate, we are potentially facing the deadliest and most costly human-made catastrophe in modern times.

“Without urgent, coordinated activity by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Even if fresh antibiotics could solve the problem, there are obstacles to their development. For one thing, antibiotics have sophisticated molecular structures, which slows the discovery process. Further, they aren’t terribly lucrative for pharmaceutical manufacturers: public health concerns call for fresh antimicrobials to be financially accessible to patients and used conservatively precisely because of the AMR issue, which reduces the financial incentives to create fresh compounds. The last entirely fresh class of antibiotic was introduced thirty year ago. Eventually, bacteria will develop resistance to fresh antibiotics as well if we don’t adopt fresh approaches to using them.

Technology can play the lead role in heading off this disaster. Vast amounts of data from numerous sources are required for better decision making at all points in the process, from tracking or predicting antibiotic-resistant disease outbreaks to speeding the potential discovery of fresh antibiotic compounds. However, microbes will quickly adapt and fight back fresh medications, too, if we don’t also employ systems that help doctors diagnose and treat infection in a more targeted and judicious way.

Indeed, digital implements can help in all four deeds that the CDC recommends for combating AMR: preventing infections and their spread, tracking resistance patterns, improving antibiotic use, and developing fresh diagnostics and treatment.

Meantime, individuals who understand both the complexities of AMR and the value of technologies like machine learning, human-computer interaction (HCI), and mobile applications are working to develop and advocate for solutions that could save millions of lives.

Keeping an Eye Out for Outbreaks

Like others who are leading the fight against AMR, Dr. Steven Solomon has no illusions about the difficulty of the challenge. “It is the single most sophisticated problem in all of medicine and public health—far outpacing the complexity and the difficulty of any other problem that we face,” says Solomon, who is a global health consultant and former director of the CDC’s Office of Antimicrobial Resistance.

Solomon wants to take the battle against AMR beyond the laboratory. In his view, surveillance—tracking and analyzing various data on AMR—is critical, particularly given how quickly and widely it spreads. But surveillance efforts are presently fraught with shortcomings. The available data is fragmented and often not comparable. Hospitals fail to collect the representative samples necessary for surveillance analytics, collecting data only on those patients who practice resistance and not on those who get better. Laboratories use a broad multitude of testing methods, and reporting is not always consistent or accomplish.

Surveillance can serve as an early warning system. But weaknesses in these systems have caused public health officials to consistently underestimate the influence of AMR in loss of lives and financial costs. That’s why improving surveillance must be a top priority, says Solomon, who previously served as chair of the U.S. Federal Interagency Task Force on AMR and has been tracking the advance of AMR since he joined the U.S. Public Health Service in 1981.

A Collaborative Diagnosis

Ineffective surveillance has also contributed to large growth in the use of antibiotics when they aren’t warranted. Strong patient request and financial incentives for prescribing physicians are blamed for antibiotics manhandle in China. India has become the largest consumer of antibiotics on the planet, in part because they are prescribed or sold for diarrheal diseases and upper respiratory infections for which they have limited value. And many countries permit individuals to purchase antibiotics over the counter, exacerbating misuse and overuse.

In the United States, antibiotics are improperly prescribed 50% of the time, according to CDC estimates. One investigate of adult patients visiting U.S. doctors to treat respiratory problems found that more than two-thirds of antibiotics were prescribed for conditions that were not infections at all or for infections caused by viruses—for which an antibiotic would do nothing. That’s twenty seven million courses of antibiotics wasted a year—just for respiratory problems—in the United States alone.

And even in countries where there are national guidelines for prescribing antibiotics, those guidelines aren’t always followed. A explore published in medical journal Family Practice displayed that Swedish doctors, both those trained in Sweden and those trained abroad, inconsistently followed rules for prescribing antibiotics.

Solomon strongly believes that, worldwide, doctors need to expand their use of technology in their offices or at the bedside to guide them through a more rational treatment to antibiotic use. Doctors have traditionally been reluctant to adopt digital technologies, but Solomon thinks that the AMR crisis could switch that. Fresh digital instruments could help doctors and hospitals integrate guidelines for optimal antibiotic prescribing into their everyday treatment routines.

“Human-computer interactions are critical, as the amount of information available on antibiotic resistance far exceeds the capability of humans to process it,” says Solomon. “It offers the possibility of greatly enhancing the utility of computer-assisted physician order entry (CPOE), combined with clinical decision support.” Healthcare facilities could embed relevant information and protocols at the point of care, guiding the physician through diagnosis and prescription and, as a byproduct, facilitating the collection and reporting of antibiotic use.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital’s antibiotic stewardship division has deployed a software program that gathers information from electronic medical records, order entries, computerized laboratory and pathology reports, and more. The system measures baseline antimicrobial use, dosing, duration, costs, and use patterns. It also analyzes bacteria and trends in their susceptibilities and helps with clinical decision making and prescription choices. The aim, says Dr. David Haslam, who goes the program, is to decrease the use of “big gun” super antibiotics in favor of more targeted treatment.

While this treatment is not yet widespread, there is consensus that incorporating such clinical-decision support into electronic health records will help improve quality of care, contain costs, and reduce overtreatment in healthcare overall—not just in AMR. A two thousand thirteen randomized clinical trial finds that doctors who used decision-support implements were significantly less likely to order antibiotics than those in the control group and prescribed 50% fewer broad-spectrum antibiotics.

Putting mobile devices into doctors’ mitts could also help them accept decision support, believes Solomon. Last summer, Scotland’s National Health Service developed an antimicrobial companion app to give practitioners nationwide mobile access to clinical guidance, as well as an audit contraption to support boards in gathering data for local and national use.

“The immediacy and the consistency of the input to physicians at the time of ordering antibiotics may significantly help address the problem of overprescribing in ways that less-immediate interventions have failed to do,” Solomon says. In addition, handheld devices with so-called lab-on-a-chip technology could be used to test clinical specimens at the bedside and transmit the data across cellular or satellite networks in areas where infrastructure is more limited.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can also become invaluable technology collaborators to help doctors more precisely diagnose and treat infection. In such a system, “the physician and the AI program are truly ‘co-prescribing,’” says Solomon. “The AI can treat so much more information than the physician and make recommendations that can incorporate more input on the type of infection, the patient’s physiologic status and history, and resistance patterns of latest isolates in that ward, in that hospital, and in the community.”

Speed Is Everything

Growing bacteria in a dish has never appealed to Dr. James Davis, a computational biologist with joint appointments at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago Computation Institute. The very first of a growing breed of computational biologists, Davis chose a PhD advisor in two thousand four who was steeped in bioinformatics technology “because you could see that things were kicking off to switch,” he says. He was one of the very first in his microbiology department to submit a totally “dry” dissertation—that is, one that was all digital with nothing grown in a lab.

Upon graduation, Davis desired to see if it was possible to predict whether an organism would be susceptible or resistant to a given antibiotic, leading him to explore the potential of machine learning to predict AMR.

As the availability of cheap computing power has gone up and the cost of genome sequencing has gone down, it has become possible to sequence a pathogen sample in order to detect its AMR resistance mechanisms. This could permit doctors to identify the nature of an infection in minutes instead of hours or days, says Davis.

Davis is part of a team creating a giant database of bacterial genomes with AMR metadata for the Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC), funded by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to collect data on priority pathogens, such as tuberculosis and gonorrhea.

Because the current inability to identify microbes quickly is one of the thickest roadblocks to making an accurate diagnosis, the team’s work is critically significant. The standard method for identifying drug resistance is to take a sample from a wound, blood, or urine and expose the resident bacteria to various antibiotics. If the bacterial colony proceeds to divide and thrive despite the presence of a normally effective drug, it indicates resistance. The process typically takes inbetween sixteen and twenty hours, itself an inordinate amount of time in matters of life and death. For certain strains of antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, however, such testing can take a week. While physicians are waiting for test results, they often prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics or make a best guess about what drug will work based on their skill of what’s happening in their hospital, “and in the meantime, you either get better,” says Davis, “or you don’t.”

At PATRIC, researchers are using machine-learning classifiers to identify regions of the genome involved in antibiotic resistance that could form the foundation for a “laboratory free” process for predicting resistance. Being able to identify the genetic mechanisms of AMR and predict the behavior of bacterial pathogens without petri dishes could inform clinical decision making and improve reaction time. Thus far, the researchers have developed machine-learning classifiers for identifying antibiotic resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii (a big player in hospital-acquired infection), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a.k.a. MRSA, a worldwide problem), and Streptococcus pneumoniae (a leading cause of bacterial meningitis), with accuracies ranging from 88% to 99%.

Houston Methodist Hospital, which uses the PATRIC database, is researching multidrug-resistant bacteria, specifically MRSA. Not only does resistance increase the cost of care, but people with MRSA are 64% more likely to die than people with a nonresistant form of the infection, according to WHO. Houston Methodist is investigating the molecular genetic causes of drug resistance in MRSA in order to identify fresh treatment approaches and help develop novel antimicrobial agents.

The Hunt for a Fresh Class of Antibiotics

There are antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and then there’s Clostridium difficile—a.k.a. C. difficile—a bacterium that attacks the intestines even in youthfull and healthy patients in hospitals after the use of antibiotics.

It is because of C. difficile that Dr. L. Clifford McDonald hopped into the AMR fight. The epidemiologist was ending his work analyzing the spread of SARS in Toronto hospitals in two thousand four when he turned his attention to C. difficile, wooed that the bacteria would become more common and more deadly. He was right, and today he’s at the forefront of treating the infection and preventing the spread of AMR as senior advisor for science and integrity in the CDC’s Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion. “[AMR] is an area that we’re funding heavily…insofar as the CDC budget can fund anything strongly,” says McDonald, whose group has awarded $14 million in contracts for innovative anti-AMR approaches.

Developing fresh antibiotics is a major part of the AMR battle. The majority of fresh antibiotics developed in latest years have been variations of existing drug classes. It’s been three decades since the last fresh class of antibiotics was introduced. Less than 5% of venture capital in pharmaceutical R&D is focused on antimicrobial development. A two thousand eight explore found that less than 10% of the one hundred sixty seven antibiotics in development at the time had a fresh “mechanism of action” to deal with multidrug resistance. “The low-hanging fruit [of antibiotic development] has been picked,” noted a WHO report.

Researchers will have to dig much deeper to develop novel medicines. Machine learning could help drug developers sort through much larger data sets and go about the capital-intensive drug development process in a more prescriptive style, synthesizing those molecules most likely to have an influence.

McDonald believes that it will become lighter to find fresh antibiotics if we build up a better understanding of the communities of bacteria living in each of us—as many as 1,000 different types of microbes live in our intestines, for example. Disruption to those microbial communities—our “microbiome”—can herald AMR. McDonald says that Big Data and machine learning will be needed to unlock our microbiomes, and that’s where much of the medical community’s investment is going.

He predicts that within five years, hospitals will take fecal samples or skin swabs and sequence the microorganisms in them as a kind of pulse check on antibiotic resistance. “Just doing the bioinformatics to sort out what’s there and the types of antibiotic resistance that might be in that microbiome is a Big Data challenge,” McDonald says. “The only way to make sense of it, going forward, will be advanced analytic technologies, which will no doubt include machine learning.”

Reducing Resistance on the Farm

Bringing information closer to where it’s needed could also help reduce agriculture’s contribution to the antibiotic resistance problem. Antibiotics are widely given to livestock to promote growth or prevent disease. In the United States, more kilograms of antibiotics are administered to animals than to people, according to data from the FDA.

One company has developed a rapid, on-farm diagnostics implement to provide livestock producers with more accurate disease detection to make more informed management and treatment decisions, which it says has demonstrated a 47% to 59% reduction in antibiotic usage. Such systems, combined with pressure or regulations to reduce antibiotic use in meat production, could also help turn the AMR tide.

Violating Down Data Silos Is the Very first Step

Adding to the complexity of the fight against AMR is the structure and culture of the global healthcare system itself. Historically, healthcare has been a siloed industry, famous for its scattered treatment focused on transactions rather than healthy outcomes or the true value of treatment. There’s no definitive data on the influence of AMR worldwide; the best we can do is infer estimates from the information that does exist.

The thickest issue is the availability of good data to share through mobile solutions, to drive HCI clinical-decision support contraptions, and to feed supercomputers and machine-learning platforms. “We have a fragmented healthcare delivery system and therefore we have fragmented information. Getting these sources of data all into one place and then enabling them all to talk to each other has been problematic,” McDonald says.

Collecting, integrating, and sharing AMR-related data on a national and ultimately global scale will be necessary to better understand the issue. HCI and mobile contraptions can help doctors, hospitals, and public health authorities collect more information while advanced analytics, machine learning, and in-memory computing can enable them to analyze that data in close to real time. As a result, we’ll better understand patterns of resistance from the bedside to the community and up to national and international levels, says Solomon. The good news is that fresh technology capabilities like AI and fresh potential flows of data are coming online as an era of data sharing in healthcare is beginning to dawn, adds McDonald.

The ideal aim is a digitally enabled virtuous cycle of information and treatment that could save millions of dollars, lives, and perhaps even civilization if we can get there. D!

Dr. David Delaney is Chief Medical Officer for SAP.

Joseph Miles is Global Vice President, Life Sciences, for SAP.

Walt Ellenberger is Senior Director Business Development, Healthcare Transformation and Innovation, for SAP.

Saravana Chandran is Senior Director, Advanced Analytics, for SAP.

Stephanie Overby is an independent writer and editor focused on the intersection of business and technology.

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