Over 10 years experience of Traceability Solutions
By Pharmatrax Author
Category: Technoloy
No CommentsThe digital revolution continues to transform healthcare fundamentally, and many people believe that a tipping point is finally within reach.
The critical question now for pharmaceutical companies is how to stay ahead of these changes. To answer it, we sought to learn the trends and implications of digital health by interviewing 20 thought leaders across a variety of segments, including analytics, biotech, data, pharma, providers, technology, and venture capital. The consensus is that as healthcare continues to digitize, pharma companies must transform themselves in basic ways to stay competitive. Successful ones will rethink their business and operating models, transform their cultures and capabilities, and adopt a new, longer-term mind-set that fosters innovation and bold strategic moves.<a “=”” class=”link-footnote” rel=”#footnote2″ role=”tooltip” tabindex=”0″ aria-label=”Open tooltip”>2 These conclusions stem from three important themes that we took away from our conversations:
These themes strongly suggest that success in the new digital environment will require three big shifts: forging ahead beyond the pack mentality and embracing experimentation and risk taking, developing a collaborative culture and challenging barriers to sharing, and reinventing companies by building capabilities beyond traditional healthcare and updating the operating model.
Dramatic changes in the traditional roles and dynamics of healthcare stakeholders have basic implications for pharma companies. The digital revolution has spawned a consumer revolution symbolized by an increasing demand for connectedness and information. Consumers with new technology tools are becoming more active and self-directive, which changes their interactions with providers, payors, and pharma companies. As a result, new and unfamiliar forms of behavior will fundamentally affect the pharmaceutical business:
If pharma companies want to go beyond engagement and truly encourage changes in health behavior, they will need to create different kinds of solutions. Although many solutions, particularly apps, have been developed in the past few years, not all can be adopted. As Dr. Todd Johnson, the CEO of Noble.MD, puts it: “Apps that face the patient but are designed to solve pharma-company business needs should never exist. Conversely, the market desperately needs apps that focus on patient and/or provider needs—real needs with a measurable impact on health quality and cost. If those apps also meet business needs—as a secondary or tertiary outcome—they have a chance of being adopted.”
As healthcare start-ups and technology giants move into what was traditionally the pharmaceutical domain, pharma companies will need to revamp their value propositions significantly. Dr. Krishna Yeshwant of Google Ventures pinpoints the challenge in this potential future: “For pharma, there comes the question of whether they can tie digital to the assets they have. There is an interesting broader conversation to have with pharmacos about moving from a products-and-pills company to a solutions company.” The associate director of US medical affairs at one global pharma company agrees, adding, “One of the most exciting values of digital to the pharmaceutical industry is how technology may be able to supplement or support pharmacological therapies to more effectively address the problem of suboptimal outcomes.”
The Diovan–Proteus chip combination for hypertension, mentioned earlier, is one example. Another comes from Google and its partnerships with DexCom, Novartis, and Sanofi to combat diabetes. Among the approaches is uploading glucose and insulin levels to the cloud in real time through contact lenses (worn by the patient) that measure glucose levels in tears; a bandage-sized sensor sends the data to the cloud. This technology can greatly improve the quality of diabetic care and help prevent complications through the real-time detection of any aberrations in glucose and insulin levels, which would trigger the right type of medical attention.
Beyond partnering with technology players, if pharma companies provided solutions that combined different therapeutics from different manufacturers, they could also add an enormous amount of value. In oncology, there is a growing movement to combine novel immune and targeted therapies with market-leader PD-1s from Merck and BMS.
To develop the most promising combinations efficiently, these pharma companies need to access and share early data and improve their digital infrastructure to manage complex trials and submissions jointly. If intercompany combos are to move beyond HIV and oncology, pharma companies must realize that they themselves, and not only patients, can benefit from partnering and combo solutions. For example, they can mitigate the risk and cost of clinical trials for combo therapies and leverage the strengths of each partner for what it does best.
Chris Geissler and Sanjay Mathur of Silicon Valley Data Science stated the case for reimagining pharma companies in even stronger terms: they say it could actually make the difference between success and failure. Big Pharma, they add, may be doomed to fail unless it transforms itself, and what such a transformation looks like is an open question that depends on several factors. For instance, Mathur argues that pharma companies will have to build “trust and form personal relationships with the consumer.” Such a transformation may be difficult for big pharma companies “mired in traditional approaches and legacy organizational structures.” These companies would not be able to compete effectively with nimble, small to midsize rivals that “have nothing to lose. Change and survive or be acquired,” says Mathur.
Finally, certain disease states are ripe for the introduction of comprehensive solutions or systems. Diabetes, which affects 387 million people around the world and consumes one in nine ($612 billion) US healthcare dollars today,<a “=”” class=”link-footnote” rel=”#footnote4″ role=”tooltip” tabindex=”0″ aria-label=”Open tooltip”>4 is an area ready for an end-to-end solution.
As pharma companies shape their purpose and future direction, the insights from our interviewees suggest that fundamental change is needed. Companies must redefine the space they play in. They must get more specific information about their customers to identify the solutions and experiences—not just the products and drugs—those customers really need. They also have to understand precisely how such solutions will capture the most value. Then they will need to reconfigure their organizations to capture this value and realize their new approach to the business.
Our interviewees agreed that technology itself is not what hinders the pharma companies’ full-scale adoption of digital health technology. “Lots of people say there are technical challenges to integrating different medical-record systems, but I don’t think that’s true,” says Dr. Krishna Yeshwant of Google Ventures. “I struggle to see what the tactical limitations are from an IT perspective.”
That said, new technology often faces strong organizational barriers, such as mind-sets that resist IT change and conservative cultures that base decisions on perceived risks. These cultures often lack compelling incentives that reward employees for behaving in new ways by moving beyond the core. Their business structures discourage risk sharing among stakeholders. The performance metrics of most pharma companies connect directly with the bottom line and the current P&L, not with innovation, customer engagement, and future strategy.
As a result, these companies generally try new approaches or technologies only when they see their peers doing so. Most of the digital leaders we interviewed, like Kara Dennis, managing director of Medidata’s mHealth unit, believe that “every one of the required technologies exists or is almost there and largely good enough. The challenge is in pulling the new technologies and processes together for an integrated clinical trial, and this will require life-science companies to remove organizational barriers to change.”
Take data transparency and data aggregation, for example. Multiple third-party players are aggregating health data and making the data and insights available to providers and payors. “If I were a life-science company, I would want to know what the story about my drug is going to be before it’s told by others,” says Dr. Amy Abernethy of Flatiron Health. “I would want to know what adverse events there are before others surface this for me. With constant monitoring, you will find a lot of signals, and you will need to learn how to handle these signals with respect to reporting to the Food and Drug Administration. But this is not a reason to stick your head in the sand; this is how drug development is going to be done in the 21st century,” Dr. Abernethy predicts. A director at a top 20 pharma company adds, “There’s a lot of alarm around utilizing social-media data for fear of discovering adverse events. Ignorance is not an excuse. A company like ours would like to be responsible for understanding what is being said.”
Many companies come at this issue backward, according to Sanjay Mathur of Silicon Valley Data Science. The story should be “about the technology second”—not first, he says. “Companies are so consumed with what technology to use they forget that the most important thing, to start with, is to ask the right questions. You don’t need real-time insight if you don’t have a place for real-time action.”
Pharmaceutical companies must also determine what they will need to uncover distinctive insights. These insights will drive their technology strategy, which will help them to integrate vast amounts of data from disparate sources and to use analytics or other tools that support the entire business.
To achieve all of these goals, pharma companies must fundamentally shift their mind-sets, cultures, and capabilities. Only then can they transform themselves into the agile, experimentally minded solutions providers they need to be. The themes emerging from our interviews suggest strongly that companies must make three strategic shifts to succeed:
Kristy Junio, senior director of Healthcare & Life Sciences for Oracle Marketing Cloud Industry Solutions, argues that pharma companies need to build novel, trust-based personal relationships with consumers. These ties “replicate the experience and trust that providers were able to build with patients.” Technology, she says, is one way to create this bond—for example, by providing patients with more personalized information about their health and treatment.
Finally, pharma companies have a choice between developing digital solutions in-house or through partnerships. Some of our interview subjects, including Dr. Todd Johnson of Noble.MD, believe it would be better for these companies to partner with third-party technology providers through innovation funds or joint ventures. “With pharmacos’ solutions often offered and marketed in providers’ offices, third-party partners offer more objective, unbiased representation,” Johnson observes. He believes that objectivity and a lack of bias are critical for providers to build relationships of trust with their patients.
Nevertheless, virtually all of the thought leaders agreed that pharma’s old model must change and new blood must enter the system. The good news is that they see some pharma companies starting to value nontraditional skill sets—hiring marketers from other industries, such as retail, and building strategic relationships with creative agencies.
Dr. Amy Abernethy of Flatiron Health says that pharma companies need to double down on talent that truly understands science and health data. Some examples? “People like clinical informaticists who know how to work with electronic health-record data, clinicians who understand the science and didn’t just drop out of academia, or data scientists who aren’t just the IT guys in the basement but are business partners with the senior leaders.” Whether pharma companies choose M&A, strategic partnerships, or organic incubation and experimentation, they must find a way to adapt and evolve quickly. If they don’t, third-party players more willing to take risks, chart the course, and listen to consumers could supersede them.
The digitization of healthcare, even in the early stages, is having a real impact on how not only doctors but also patients manage those patients’ health and how pharma companies need to do business. Digital innovation still faces challenges, such as the lack of clarity about who pays for digital solutions, but digital and data analytics should certainly be high on the C-suite agenda. Pharma companies that want to keep up—or move ahead—must be bold and adopt an act-now mentality. They must build innovative business models, invest in new capabilities, and transform their organizational cultures.