Elsevier and InfoDesk collaborate to co-develop federated drug pipeline intelligence solution

Elsevier, a world-leading healthcare and scientific publisher, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Tarrytown, New York based InfoDesk to co-develop a federated drug pipeline intelligence solution for pharmaceutical and life science companies. The combination of Elsevier's business intelligence expertise and InfoDesk's technological know-how paves the way for the development of a powerful search and delivery tool that will increase productivity and improve the quality of results, securely inside or outside of a customer's firewall.

"We chose InfoDesk as our partner because they are content neutral and excellent at supporting many diverse publishers, an essential capability given our goal of developing a tool that can search multiple content sources. They know how to take large feeds of data to help their clients deliver information to their users," explains Gerry Stoia, President of Elsevier Business Intelligence. "We're the content experts and they're the technology experts so it makes for a good marriage. We're in this together and we're very excited about working with the InfoDesk team."

In a competitive market where 'go, no go' decisions have enormous financial implications, accurate, reliable data is mission critical. Building on the sophisticated synonym index developed as part of the Universal Integrator project initiated by Elsevier in 2007, InfoDesk will apply their knowledge and experience to develop the new search tool. They anticipate the first release will be available in the second half of 2010.

"We've noticed our pharmaceutical customers are frustrated with the way drug pipeline data is presented," observes Sterling Stites, President and CEO of InfoDesk. "There are many robust databases on the market, but with the possible exception of a few information specialists, nobody actually likes the process of using databases. Consequently, database usage stats are often disappointing. The real demand is for useful information that answers the user's question. What InfoDesk brings to the table is our unique ability to 'output' and actually 'push' content to users in a way that provides real answers. That's what drives database usage."

There are three major benefits of a tool that can deliver accurate drug pipeline results from multiple content sources in real-time from a single, federated search.

Increased productivity

A fast, federated search of multiple content sources - either proprietary or open access - will give users a single results set, increasing productivity. With the new integrated solution, searches that used to take days will take minutes.

Accurate results

Rich content drawn from a variety of sources will be filtered using InfoDesk's advanced custom taxonomy, which can be modified to meet end-user requirements. Elsevier's team of expert editors (MD and PhDs) will tag the data at ingestion (when it is first compiled) and continuously monitor as the sources are updated. In addition, customer-defined taxonomy for specific user groups and individuals will further increase the relevance of results. What's more, InfoDesk's intelligent algorithms will rationalize data by contrasting and comparing results from multiple databases to ensure the reliability of the results.

Increased security

Unlike other web-based products on the market today that are hosted externally, Elsevier and InfoDesk's new product can be hosted or installed inside a customer's firewall for greater security.

Additional modules are scheduled for release in 2011 and beyond which will give customers the opportunity to expand their federated search and integrate their proprietary internal data.

Provided by Elsevier