Merck Seeks Medical Informatics Flunkie On The Cheap @ $30/hr

At the post "Medical Informatics, Pharma, Health IT, and Golden Advice That Sits Sadly Unused" and other posts I lamented the fact that the pharma sector (in deep decline due to scientific mediocrity, ill-qualified leadership, public image tarnished by scandal, and other reasons), as well as the Healthcare IT industry (now also racked by similar issues and undergoing a Senate investigation while its products are being found to show little benefit) neglected a scientific discipline that might actually help them achieve the goals of better products, better patient care, and stronger profits.

At that post I specifically wrote about pharma that:

... In recent correspondences with colleagues I was reminded of a letter I wrote seven years ago that was published in Bio-IT World, a journal about biomedicine focusing mainly on pharma, bioinformatics and related fields.

As the sole formally-trained Medical Informatics specialist at Merck, I wrote:

Medical Informatics MIA [Missing in Action - ed.]
Bio-IT World
August 13, 2002

Dear Bio-IT World:

I enjoyed reading the article "Informatics Moves to the Head of the Class" (June Bio·IT World). Thank you for spotlighting the National Library of Medicine (NLM) training programs in medical informatics and bioinformatics, of which I am a graduate (Yale, 1994).

Bioinformatics appears to receive more media attention and offer more status, career opportunities, and compensation than the less-prestigious medical informatics.

This disparity, however, may impede the development of next-generation medicines. Bioinformatics discoveries may be more likely to result in new medicines, for example via pharmacogenomics, when they are coupled with large-scale, concurrent, ongoing clinical data collection. At the same time, applied medical informatics, as a distinct specialty, is essential to the success of extensive clinical data collection efforts, especially at the point of care.

Hospital and provider MIS personnel are best equipped for implementing business-oriented IT, not clinical IT. Implementing clinical IT in patient-care settings constitutes one of the core competencies of applied medical informaticists.

Informatics specialists with a bioinformatics focus — even those coming from the new joint programs — usually are not proficient in hospital business and management issues that impede adoption of clinical IT in patient care settings. Such organizational and territorial issues are in no small way responsible for the low utilization of clinical IT in patient care settings.

It will be important for medical informaticists focused in the clinical domain and bioinformaticists specializing in the molecular domain to collaborate with other specialists in order to best integrate clinical and genomic data.

[note: I was directed to add the "with other specialists" phrase by internal reviewers at Merck; it was not in my original piece. My intent was that bioinformatics and medical informatics specialists collaborate with each other - ed.]

Further information on these issues can be found in the book Organizational Aspects of Health Informatics: Managing Technological Change, by Nancy M. Lorenzi and Robert T. Riley (Springer-Verlag, 1995). Various publications from the medical informatics community, such as the American Medical Informatics Association (www.amia.org) and the International Medical Informatics Association (www.imia.org), are also useful.

Scot Silverstein, MD
Director, Published Information Resources & The Merck Index
Merck Research Laboratories

I was also responsible for the entry of the term "Medical Informatics" into the controlled vocabulary pool used for various purposes at Merck.

After a mere seven years, it looks like someone there has realized the need for Medical Informatics expertise.

Unfortunately, consistent with prior posts including an Open Letter to Merck CEO Richard Clark on informatics, and the observation that bioinformatics has probably hit a hard wall of stagnation due to disciplinary insularity and resultant inadequate collaboration with its medical counterpart, it's clear pharma hasn't yet fully received the message -- in line with this medieval drawing.

I wad directed to this job posting for a one-year Medical Informatics temp position:

Nov. 2, 2009

Position : SCIENTIST –Pharma ("Medical Informatics Scientist"
Location: Boston, MA
Length: 1 YEAR
Rate: $38/hr Max

[Thirty-eight dollars per hour, max? Holy cow - ed.]

Client needs an innovative, talented, agile leader in the field of Medical Informatics --with experience connecting genomic analyses/information with patient medical records -- to help position Merck in the rapidly evolving space of personalized medicine. --solid experience in statistics, bioinformatics, medical informatics, and programming -- 3+ yrs of experience developing and using text analytics and NLP for extraction of information from medical records. -- 5+ yrs of people and project management experience -- solid biology background including experience with oncology vocabularies/ontologies -- experience with genomic data analysis (gene expression, genotyping, sequencing), biomarkers, and pharmacogenetics applied to clinical samples -- 5+ yrs of scientific programming experience -- comfortable working with physicians and IT groups [a "medical informatics" leader would be far more than "comfortable" in such settings - ed.] -- familiar with drug discovery and development process.

*Responsibilities:*

Actual Job Title: "Medical Informatics Scientist" Helps develop and implement Merck's medical informatics strategy, supporting personalized medicine initiatives at Merck. Merck's Partnership with the Moffitt Cancer Research Center will be the main starting point. Collaborates with Merck Therapeutic Areas, and Merck and Moffitt IT groups to prototype medical informatics solutions for collaborative implementation. Provides flexible scripts, prototype data pipelines, DB design, mockups, product management, including requirements for software design and development. Leads collaboration with knowledge management area and leading academic labs to develop/refine text- based natural language processing (NLP) methods for standardizing medical informatics data, defining vocabularies, and building pipelines.

Please send the updated resume of the consultant along with the rate,
location and contact information. Please make sure the Consultant's skills
match the requirement. After reviewing the resume I will contact you if I
need more information.

Thanks,

Anand Bandarupally
Nihaki Systems Inc
346 Georges Road, Suite # 1, Dayton, NJ 08810.

That's a very tall order.

$38 per hour max - as a temp without benefits - probably works out to something like two thirds of that per hour after health insurance, taxes, etc. Not to mention the expense of the Boston area.

So, a "talented, agile leader in Medical Informatics" - who has made the sacrifice to invest time and energy into training in the field - is worth about $30 per hour to a major pharma.

This eyebrow-raising absurdity should really alarm the stockholders, Moffatt Cancer Center leaders, the Boards of both Merck and Moffatt, the leadership of the Medical Informatics community, and anyone with an interest in the development of new medicines and the economic stability that results from success in that domain.

Also, in my view anyone with significant skills who takes such a position at that type of compensation is doing the profession of Medical Informatics a disservice, by further lowering the "comps" for the field, that is, the benchmark data and formulas that HR recruiters use to gauge professional salary ranges. (One might wonder who in fact came up with this penurious figure to begin with).

Put simply, it seems Merck seeks a Medical Informatics flunkie who will work for peanuts, and probably provide results to match in "building pipelines" of new and safer drugs.

-- SS