One of our customers is The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the organization responsible for the sequencing of one-third of the human genome. Wellcome Trust made international headlines in June with the announcement of the discovery of specific genes for seven common ailments.

Here is an excerpt from a detailed article in the UK’s Telegraph:

“The largest ever study of its kind has found 10 new genes linked to seven of the most common ailments: heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, bipolar disorder and Crohn’s disease.

Some 200 British scientists from 50 research groups collaborated to discover the genes after screening DNA from 17,000 people.

‘By identifying the genes underlying these conditions, our study should enable scientists to understand better how disease occurs, which people are most at risk and, in time, to produce more effective, more personalised treatments.’said Professor Peter Donnelly from Oxford University, chairman of the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium.”

Our small part in all this is that Wellcome Trust uses both everRun HA and everRun FT to keep researchers continuously connected to their Exchange servers and certain reporting systems. They will also be using everRun to ensure their new ERP system is always available. You can read more about how Wellcome Trust uses everRun here.

Today, Shahid Shah, author of The Healthcare IT Guy blog, posted an article written by our own Joost Verhofstad, Director of Healthcare Solutions. To give you a quick overview, the article discusses the growing need and demand for safeguarding critical patient information to ensure that unplanned system downtime never comes between patients and their healthcare needs. Here is an excerpt:

“What is the single most reason given by Healthcare IT Administrators for improving IT infrastructure? Without question, Patient Care tops every list, followed closely by federal regulations and costs. With the rise in government mandated regulations such as HIPAA, identifying ways to encourage widespread use of electronic data interchange has resulted in a surge of activity within healthcare organizations from hospitals to pharmaceutical organizations looking for ways to streamline processes that improve patient care and reduce risk. In today’s world, it is imperative that no patient ever has to wait to receive care; especially not as a result of paperwork or technology issues.”

Take a look at the post and leave any feedback you might have, or if you are interested in case studies from some of our clients in the Healthcare industry, please let us know and we would be happy to share them with you.

One of our beliefs is that virtualization will find its way into the broader markets by the year 2010. Like all new technology that enters, there is a life-cycle for adoption that products go through before crossing the chasm into the mainstream markets. Virtualization is currently in the Innovator stage, where vendors are competing with one another to capture the attention of the early adopter market. See this post illustrating the ongoing battle between leading virtualization vendors VMWare and XenSource.

Cutting through the vendor hype are two industries that we believe will help push virtualization beyond the early adopters, healthcare and financial services. Just this week IBM announced the consolidation of the data center at St. Anthony’s Medical Center in St. Louis using their virtualization technology. This is a giant leap for the healthcare industry because not only does it eliminate administrative and IT costs, but patient records, tests and results are now being archived which will enhance overall patient care. As other industries recognize how organizations like St. Anthony’s can move critical applications and information to virtual environments, they will be more likely to introduce virtual environments into their own organizations. Of course, these organizations will only do this once they are convinced in the reliability of those virtual applications.