Digital Transformation in the Pharma Segment

Digital Disruption in pharma space is not new, however the current trends in the technology are making a bigger impact on the pharma companies. Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning(ML) and Big Data are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry.

Based on our experience of over 18 years in the pharma segment, here are the key trends that are impacting the pharma segment –

Disruption in Supply chain ecosystem:

Supply chain ecosystem is transforming into an intelligent, connected and integrated ecosystem. The key focus has been to automate the process of order collection, pick- pack-ship process integrated with supply chain forecasting. This significantly reduces the manual duplication of efforts in reaching out to the right customer with the right product and at the right time.

Moreover, historical data combined with predictive models from the supply chain intelligently impacts the movement of inventory which ends up in the reduction of waste. There is also a trend of moving away from different products in supply chain ecosystem to one single unified, flagship product approach that can track each product and can bring insightful reports related to inventory, sales, pricing margins and profitability.

Streamlining the FDA approval processes for faster Go to Market:

As the market opportunities increase time-to-market new initiatives are even more important for pharma and life sciences companies. Hence more and more focus is into empowering the process of meaningful data around the clinical trials. 

With the advancement in automation, the focus is on how to automate, streamline and prepare for the validation of GxP systems that can result in faster FDA approvals. Secondly, the data collection techniques have been empowered by a unified platform to feed the early stage trials to give meaningful outcomes. These have been helping the research teams to collaborate and fast track the research outputs. The use of effective collaboration technologies empowered with search and version controls of clinical studies and reports are very handy for tracking the history. 

Shifting towards a patient centric approach:

Use of AI based chatbots to capture doctor patient conversations and create libraries of various aspects of a clinical study like capturing patient consents, patient history, recording investigations, performing analysis and sharing of outcomes with a similar group of investigators will be fundamental in performing an effective clinical trial.

Moreover, the emphasis is also being shifting towards a continuous pre and post-patient experience, which leads to creating a satisfied patient experience. The clinical research team will be empowered to fast track the process of data collection, cleaning and management of such data.

Use of wearables in performing clinical trials:

With the emergence of IoT, the use of wearables and sensors will make the life of a patient easier. One of the biggest challenges in trails is patient expenses and patient willingness to travel the trial site, patients can now leverage the wearables to track their daily activity and monitor different vital signs. This data forms the basis of the quality of life improvements. Moreover, such data sets when compared with on-site studies can give meaningful insights about the behavioral aspects of the data.

Adoption of Engaging Commerce Experience as a hygiene strategy: With a major shift in delivering value, patient buying behavior has been continuously monitored and tracked. With the latest trends in the way patient purchases products, a major focus has been on bringing a personalized patient or consumer experience.

Right from the products searched over popular sales platforms, to advertising the right product on the social media platforms, the trend has been to provide the right personalized buying experience. With the advancement of technologies, more and more pharma companies are either rebuilding their online channels or merge their platforms to intelligently support online and offline channels. While they do so, it is equally important to take better control of the content for a personalized experience.

More and more pharma companies are moving towards a transformed customer experience through there digital platform initiatives. This finally comes down to manage the entire content experience landscape for target audiences across different touch points.