As of 2019-end, the global pharma industry was valued at an astounding, yet unsurprising, $1.25 trillion dollars. With COVID-19 wreaking havoc around the world, the impact of this industry has now become more apparent than ever.
Industry leaders like Pfizer, Roche and others are investing heavily in new-age technologies like cloud, mobility, AI, ML & advanced analytics. Despite heavy government regulation, Pfizer has invested undisclosed amounts into IoT foreseeing the boom in wearable technology. Data supported clinical decision-making is poised to play a major role in the future of digital healthcare.
It’s not just in decision-making, intelligent assistants have found a place inside the operating rooms and some are engaged in extracting life-saving insights from scans. Some, like Amazon Comprehend Medical, leverage NLP to quickly gather information from patient records, doctor’s notes, clinical trial records, etc.
In light of these encouraging market shift, we explore what are some emerging digital themes fueling digital transformation in the pharma industry and how service providers can leverage these for sales opportunities.
AI-Assisted Clinical Trials
AI-powered capabilities such as pattern recognition, evolutionary modelling, data compilation and interpretation are being used to optimize clinical trials. While traditional clinical trials take 10-15 years to complete, AI is being used to fastrack the whole process.
Companies like AI Therapeutics have been using AI algorithms to match drugs to new indications. AI trial predictor technology is being used to identify drugs, vaccines or medical devices that are most likely to succeed.
Analytics-powered software have played a vital role in significantly reducing the time-to-public for a COVID-19 vaccine with the earliest candidate predicted to be ready by 2020-end.
Other important aspects for the success of a clinical trials are personalized patient engagement, quality data capture, operational efficiency and compliance.
TCS Connected Clinical TrialsTM helps pharma companies harvest smart digital data to aid in their decision making. The solution provides an integrated platform where sponsors can run a variety of digital trials for different therapeutic areas. This helps them with intelligent trial medication, digital patient engagement and site management.
Healthcare Moves Beyond-The-Pill
In the age of cost-cutting, stakeholders are increasingly becoming aware of managing costs while delivering improved patient outcomes. This has forced pharma companies to demonstrate the true value of their pills to gain access to the market and ask for premium pricing.
This is being achieved with the power IoT-enabled sensors. No more relying on trial participants to dutifully fill out detailed questionnaires. Now sensors can do that quickly, accurately and in real time.
IoT is an investment-heavy undertaking and pharma companies are always looking to forge new partnership to realize their diagnostic goals so that they can just focus on the pill efficacy.
Pharma companies are focusing on integrating their digital infrastructure to accelerate the drug-discovery & the drug-manufacturing process. Key to this is the evolution in IoT which is connecting laboraties spread across locations and even laboratory equipments itself, aka, the connected laboratory.
Equipment handling fluids in biosafety cabinets are monitored by the containers holding them. These containers send out routine alerts over SMS or email on relevant parameters. They can also be programmed with IFTTT programs that trigger actions when certain conditions are met, all without human interaction.
Continuous monitoring of equipments and solutions is helping stakeholders balance profitability, lab safety & operational costs.
Big Tech Making Inroads to Personal Healthcare
Apple has partnered with the IBM Watson Health platform to use advanced analytics and NLP to assist in clinical decision support. Other tech giants like Google and Qualcomm are also making strides into the personal healthcare ecosystem. Data that was previously only available to pharma companies and healthcare providers are now accessible to tech giants.
This has left many worrying since these tech giants are exceptionally good a monetizing such data leaving pharma in the lurch.
Pharma companies are only now exploring strategies to compete or collaborating with these new players. Undoubtedly, this will require a huge leap in technology capabilities across cloud, analytics and data warehousing. Even hardware manufacturers with a proven expertise in manufacturing/assembling chipsets/devices are looking at a whole new sector embracing their services.
Even giants in the digital services industry are rolling into the pharma sector with Infosys launching a Personalized Medicine solution for the pharma industry. The modular solution, built upon the SAP platform, the solution leverages advanced analytics to deliver intelligent insights that enable pharmas to reduce their implementation time and launch products in a shorter time frame.
Continued Momentum Post-COVID-19
While digital transformation was already well underway pre-COVID, the pharma industry is already ramping up investment to keep up with disease and demand.
Digital service providers with a keen eye on the pharma markets would’ve noticed that there is a spike in the adoption of data modelling techniques and cloud solutions among pharma companies.
Draup’s account intelligence and real-time sales signals tracking delivers actionable insights based on movements in the healthcare market. Service providers can leverage the industry-specific information to curate their offerings and finetune their bidding proposals. Armed with the right location and industry intelligence data for the healthcare market, Draup empowers service providers with the right toolset to confidently make inroads into untapped markets.
