Skila's eWorkbench assists business decision making in the pharm, device, and biotech industries

Skila's eWorkbench plug-in enables Internet-wide "Intelligration"

Skila Inc. (Mahwah, NJ), which specializes in web-based products for pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology industries, has launched its eWorkbench, Internet plug-in product. eWorkbench enhances productivity in areas such as business development, sales, and marketing by facilitating decision-making at a time when productivity among information-saturated knowledge workers in the healthcare industry is becoming a serious challenge.

As a result of the growing role of the Internet as a research tool, companies are challenged with trying to optimize productivity in the face of an information explosion. Consider the following statistics derived from industry research:

• In 1999, there were 9 million websites with 50,000 new outlets coming online each week.
  
• Each day, 2.2 million pages of new, unique content becomes available on the Internet.
  
• By 2004, the most conservative estimates of growth show that digitized data will outrun the most aggressive advances in technology to manage it.
  
• The impact of this rapid expansion of online information is astounding: In a study of over 400 pharmaceutical executives, "searching" for information encompassed 26% of their time, according to research by Skila.
  
• Yahoo! is perceived as the search tool most used by pharmaceutical executives, yet on average it takes seven attempts to find valuable results.
  
• By 2003, US productivity of the knowledge worker will decrease by 10% as a result of information overload—Skila Inc.

Unlike Skila's existing offerings, Skila's eWorkbench is an Internet plug-in, allowing current Skila users to take Skila's Intelligration technology with them while they navigate the Internet or their own intranet. Intelligration is a proprietary Skila process that integrates thousands of internal and external sources, transforming terabytes of information into concise views of actionable intelligence.

"Along with the eWorksite, Skila's eWorkbench assists business decision-making across a product's life cycle by enabling healthcare professionals to manage information available on the Internet," said John Neeson, CEO of Skila Inc. "This time-saving product can be used by smaller entrepreneurial companies, as well as larger pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device organizations. What makes the eWorkbench truly unique, innovative, and revolutionary is that the knowledge of Skila can now be used anywhere you go on the Internet or a client's corporate Intranet."

How it works
Skila's eWorkbench is a set of tools for gathering intelligence while browsing the web and serves as a communication link between the Internet and the Skila eWorksite. It allows any user of a Web browser to enrich any healthcare-related web content on the fly by merely clicking on a Skila "Intelligrate" button embedded in his/her browser. In response to clicking on the "Intelligrate" button, all Skila-controlled vocabulary terms are detected on the current page, highlighted, and made "mouse sensitive." Clicking on any of these terms automatically causes the eWorkbench to collect highly relevant, structured content elaborating on the selected term, without leaving the document.

For more information: John Neeson, CEO, Skila Inc., 1200 MacArthur Blvd., Mahwah, NJ 07430. Tel: 201-818-2277. Fax: 201-818-5222.

Edited by Angelo DePalma
Managing Editor, Drug Discovery Online

For more information on Skila, click here.