Reshaping Pharma with Digital Transformation

Digital transformation isn’t a new imperative for business leaders, but COVID-19 has made it more urgent, and pharma is no exception, with pharma companies looking to enhance their agility, speed, and data-driven decision making. Pharma companies can reshape their digital transformation into gear by taking a bionic approach, blending human and technical capabilities, and keep the momentum going.

Turning to digital processes can have a wide range of benefits, including quicker and more simplified processes, easier communication with clients, and more unified projects between various employees. 

Digital transformation isn’t a “one and done” shift; it is a cultural change that requires organizations to embrace continuous trial and error as well as adaptation to the changing landscape.

Digital Transformation in Pharma

Digital transformation in the pharmaceutical sector means implementing various digital technologies to improve the production and provision of healthcare products and services. In the pharmaceutical sector, the following business areas can be optimized using digital transformation:

• Drug development
• Better R&D in drugs 
• Achieving better patient care and interaction
• Improved pharmaceutical distribution
• Achieving transparency in supply chain
• Reduced carbon impact

Three Digital Transformation trends to shape your digital transformation journey

As the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries have undergone sort of digital transformation, the world of healthcare looks markedly different than it did even ten years ago. And we predict that shift to continue. Let’s look at the top 3 trends to help reshape your digital initiatives:

1. Automation

Automation has been effective to digitally transform the pharmaceutical supply chain. Globally automation initiatives have reduced operational costs by $122 billion annually in pharma companies.

Use cases of Automation include:

• Automation is being implemented and used to improve the manufacturing process of drugs and other pharmaceutical products. 
• RPA (Robotic Process Automation) can be used to streamline the patient recruitment process of drug trials. 
• RPA can help improve regulatory affairs by gathering and verifying documents according to regulatory standards.

2. AI and Analytics

AI innovation in the pharmaceutical sector has observed a significant rise in the past few years. AI technology is projected to increase to over $100 billion in revenues by 2025. 

Use cases of AI are in the following business areas:

• Conversational AI is still relatively new, can be a great way to handle any complaints or basic questions about a drug, all while helping the patient to feel at ease.
• AI technology can help learn from past mistakes and make the drug discovery process more efficient and can also improve production for life-saving drugs.
• ML model’s ability to quickly analyze large amounts of data can help improve disease identification. It can also help clinicians to decide which treatment to use.
• AI technology is being widely used to improve the prediction and readiness for pandemics. It can also help improve pharma supply chain to prepare inventory levels.
• Through advanced analytics, companies can use different sources of data to accurately identify the best population for their trials.
• Early discovery of drug reactions through machine learning by accessing pre-existing side-effects data, potential adverse reactions to the medicine can be predicted even before the trial.

3. IoT (Internet of Things)

Although IoT finds opportunities across the entire value chain, R&D, clinical development, supply chain and patient centricity are the areas where its intervention is likely to reap most benefits.

Use cases of IoT across business areas:

• Drug discovery and Development: Use of sensors and devices to monitor clinical sites, subjects screening and real-time reporting
• Manufacturing and Supply chain: Realtime logistics visibility using RFID & sensors to capture and report parameters including temperatures; Smart warehousing and routing; Predictive Maintenance of machines and equipment
• Sales and Marketing: Drug Interaction checker – Interactive ecosystem with HCPs using NFC and allergy detection to preemptively discover adverse reactions
• Patient Access: Wearable devices; Smart pill with dose variablization; Drug usage tracking and medication compliance

Closing notes

As the movement of experiences from physical place to digital space accelerates, and many pharmaceutical companies have already taken steps toward digital transformation. Traffic to pharmaceutical websites is increasing in record numbers, and patients are demanding more from these companies each day. 

The future is increasingly digital and key to success in your digital strategy journey needs to combine both domain and technology. At MReuslt, we enable seamless digital transformation through our core service offering which are tailored for the pharma and life sciences industries.  Using our digital transformation services to your advantage, allows your company to offer easily accessible information, provide more personalized services, and demonstrate your unique value compared to your competitors.