What are the biggest challenges for life sciences and pharmaceutical industries and how many of them can be addressed?

Hello and welcome to the next post of our exclusive Digital Transformation in Healthcare Series. In our last post, we discussed the challenges and solutions in the healthcare providers’ segment. From negative morale of healthcare staff to delays in treatments because of delayed reports and data and lack of interoperability of data, we saw the shortcomings faced by healthcare professionals on a daily basis.

We also addressed their solutions extensively.

Today, we will shed light on another important wing of the healthcare system – life sciences and pharma. These two distinct segments in the healthcare sector have several common and overlapping challenges that digital transformation could easily fix.

For those of you who are mildly confused about the differences between the two, understand that life sciences are an industry that is responsible for research, testing and development of medical instruments, devices, biopharmaceuticals, advanced health instruments, common lab chemicals and more.

Pharma, on the other hand, researches, tests and develops drugs that would be either Over the Counter (OTC) or prescribed by doctors. Pharmaceutical companies develop drugs that treat symptoms, fight chronic diseases and more and are subjected to several safety and efficacy protocols.

Now both are complex in terms of their operations and ride on risky lines. They deal with the direct health and wellbeing of people and hence cannot afford any mistakes. Vaccines they develop would treat millions and the devices they roll out monitor the health of billions. With their application so vast and crucial, this industry has to be airtight in all aspects.

Ironically, there are still several loopholes in their systems and workflows which prevent them from realizing their full efficiency. And that is exactly what we are going to understand today.

So, let’s get started. But like usual, let’s get a quick idea of their markets and standings in numbers.

• In 2018, the global worth of the pharmaceutical industry was close to $1.2tn.
• It costs around $2.6mn to develop a new drug.
• There are close to 7,000 drugs that are in their development stages currently.
• The biggest pharma market is the US.
• Over 70% of the Americans are at least on one prescribed drug.
• 1 out of 4 American skips a dose of their prescribed medicine to save on the expenses incurred in procuring it.
• Pharma companies spend more on advertising a drug than developing it.

Like you saw, it’s not easy to run a life science or a pharma company. With regulations, legal compliances, policies, R&D , marketing, administration, coordination and more involved, it’s probably one of the most hectic industries to be associated with. Every single day, there are more than one concern plaguing the operations.

Let’s understand in detail what some of the most common challenges are.

Industries like life science and pharma are heavily equipment-reliant. From the ideation and research of a new drug or a biomedical instrument that happens on paper to running simulations of it and getting 3D rendered images of it to its development and manufacturing, the entire industry depends on equipment and its functionality.

Unfortunately, this is one of the first (and major) challenges the industries face. The segment lacks a streamlined equipment servicing process, where there is no way to come up with servicing calendars or maintenance days in advance. Mostly, servicing happens on a case basis, where they are given attention when equipment either malfunction or begin to show symptoms of malfunction. This ends up rattling the entire manufacturing process.

Clinical trials are one of the crucial stages in drug research and development. It is where pharma companies record and process data on whether the new drug or vaccine that is being developed is actually effective, works on symptoms, shows results and more. In this process, the data generated has to be in real-time to record the most precise developments about the drug and its functionality in the human body.

However, this is not the reality today as clinical trial patients are still contacted and tracked by obsolete mechanisms (mostly through email which is not much effective in this industry). This causes a delay in the recording of the progress about the drug’s interaction with bodily fluids and chemicals and gives rise to a report that is either skewed or invalid. The entire expense, time and effort channelized into clinical trials ends up being futile. The need for a highly effective and instantaneous clinical trial system is inevitable today.

As segments in healthcare transition towards a more data-heavy mechanism, what becomes crucial is the accuracy at which data is generated, stored, accessed and retrieved. This refers to the efforts taken by an organization to ensure the accuracy of its data. With cybersecurity still becoming airtight and data being exposed to vulnerabilities and manipulations, there are intense requirements with respect to data integrity. At any given point of time, data collected should be original, accurate, attributable, legible and contemporaneous. Such integrity not only pushes product quality but patient safety as well. Where there is no data integrity, instances like loss of strategic insights, public trust, plant shutdowns and others are bound to be attracted.

According to a report by Deloitte, the price involved in bringing a drug successfully into the market has increased by 25%. This cost surge is the culmination of fragments of costs associated in the operations of all departments of the company. Machinery, staffing, enterprise software and tools, supply-chain and more, costs are incurred in every step. Though none of the stages can be eliminated, costs can be immensely reduced by implementing digitization of processes. When smaller shortcomings are addressed and resolved, they lead to an increase in operational efficiencies. And an efficient process requires less costs and produces more output. Achieving this is a challenge today.

The records and insights generated during clinical trials will be pointless if they are not streamlined and put to their purposes. The trials have to follow a systematic process so data is passed on from one stakeholder to the other for the entire process to attain fruition. A disjointed process only delays the process of drug development and manufacturing. In a time like a pandemic, streamlining of processes is critical and the new drug has to be rolled out as early as possible and as effectively as possible. Organizations stuck with obsolete mechanisms can hardly achieve both.

Big pharma is always under pressure to stay updated and advanced with evolving technologies. It’s majorly because of the market they are in. Companies can be a step ahead of pandemics and viral outbreaks only when they are equipped with advanced technologies and tools. That’s why there is a constant challenge to stay abreast of the current happenings and keep an eye out for emerging trends in tech implementations and integrations as well. Such trend analysis will not only help companies stay ahead but capitalize on any opportunity that comes their way.

When companies use only emails to assign tasks, it becomes difficult to track conversations at times of escalations. Though emails get the job done, pharma and life science companies need elements beyond processes that merely get the job done. Technicians and staff cannot be held accountable on emails and they are subjected to a lot of bias and intervention. Micromanagement becomes a problem for them. A centralized task allocation process or workflow, where every member of the team and department has knowledge of their roles, tasks, accountability and responsibility, is what is needed today. This also makes technicians and staff feel empowered as they don’t have to wait for orders, which could further delay other processes.

Complaint management is key in healthcare. It’s not like broken furniture, where any carpenter could fix it. It’s a highly specialized and science-driven process and result that deals with human lives. Ineffective drugs, malfunctioning medical devices, drugs that induce side effects and more are problems that big companies need to address and fix. For that, a portal where consumers or businesses could directly file complaints and interact with them is essential. With obsolete mechanisms, complaints hardly take off from the desks of associated staff members. They don’t reach the hierarchy with authority. So, they remain unresolved. When middlemen in the process are eliminated, complaints can be minimized. A portal or a channel is inevitable in this case.

According to data collected between 1998 and 2016, the amount Big Pharma spent on lobbying expenses was close to $3bn. It would be injustice to say that misconduct doesn't happen in this segment. To fetch deals, sign contracts, meet targets, push drug discovery and more, sales people do indulge in malpractices. This goes unnoticed when there is no proper tracking system in place. Call audits, digital surveillance, confidentiality protocols and other aspects play a key role in managing and controlling such instances.

Siloed information refers to insights and information that get stagnated or restricted within one particular department or team. Efficiency can be optimized only when insights are interoperable and put to collective uses. When only two teams or departments have access to insights and other stakeholders don’t, it gives rise to process inaccuracies, delays and more. What is worse than no information is siloed information and this majorly stems from the lack of a centralized portal or enterprise management system that brings everyone together digitally.

Very similar to the above-mentioned point, this is when processes and systems are disconnected. Meaning, all operate autonomously with no coordination among them. When there are five versions operating for one common goal, the results are not just diverse but disjointed as well. It’s like every single team or department is fixing its own version of the jigsaw puzzle.

This puts the organization in a sketchy spot when it comes to legal and compliance issues as immense coordination is required from teams. In terms of product development and its cycle, such disconnection results in a frustrated environment, where modules with variations are developed and deployed by teams. Drug research and development could take a heavy hit in such instances.

Collaboration is essential not just with the teams and departments operating out of the same premises but globally as well. When an organization has multiple branches and a team from Singapore has to collaborate and work together with a team in Dallas, coordination becomes all the more crucial. So, regardless of the geography of operation, companies require portals that could connect every single employee with every other one seamlessly. Besides this, collaboration is also essential among R&D centers, manufacturing units and dispatching units to ensure the cycle is complete. This clearly lacks today.

This extensive list of complex challenges has distinct solutions – through digital transformation. Let’s check out some of the implementations.

Problems like collaboration, coordination, disjointed processes, disconnected workflows can be easily addressed and fixed with the integration of enterprise applications. An enterprise application is one that the entire business deploys across its operations. This is what staff use to log in, mark attendance, check tasks, coordinate, reach out, communicate, schedule meetings, get insights, see progress and more. With appropriate access, any detail be retrieved by any employee. An enterprise application streamlines processes and makes data and insights seamlessly accessible to all stakeholders, reducing any associated delays and optimizing interoperability.

Predictive analytics is a data science wing that works on historic data, prevailing trends and user-generated data to predict something for a given point in time. It uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms to accurately predict outcomes. With this integration, clinical trials could be simplified with AI taking care of genome sequencing, synthesis and simulating outcomes and combinations.

This could put the entire process of drug development and testing on a fast track as AI is not only fool proof but precise as well. AI could also be used to detect how a drug would respond to different body conditions and identify side effects. It’s being increasingly deployed for cancer detection, DNA analytics for hereditary diseases and more.

The effectiveness of a drug isn’t determined once it is manufactured and rolled out but even before it's noted down on paper. The pharma market is cluttered with medications today and so companies have to spend more time on identifying different parameters to stand out. Drug discovery is a crucial phase that can be made airtight only with tech implementations. Credible algorithms and enterprise search engines for market research, data mining tools for competitor analysis and more are required to manufacture and release an effective drug in the market.

Life science and pharma are complicated industries. There are tons of intricacies involved in terms of regulations, legalities and compliances. A majority of the time of associates go into these protocols and practices in compiling documentation and paperwork. However, this could be simplified and streamlined with automation, where compliance and statutory obligations could be listed and automated for collection, processing and compiling of paperwork and documentation. Human intervention can be brought in to verify the outcomes and take the processes further.

There are several avenues for companies to reach out to their target companies and consumers. There’s PR, professional networking tools, social media for Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) features and more. On each channel, the tone, approach and content vary. What sounds too technical in a PR piece could be simplified for social media channels and video streaming channels. With so many channels involved, generating and distributing content becomes a mess. That’s why a centralized Content Management System with built-in content calendars and automation tools could save marketing people tons of time on executing tasks and focus more on ideating campaigns.

Medical information takes a distinct meaning in different departments. From a patient perspective, this means their electronic health record, which carries information like patient name and demographics, health history, allergies and symptoms, diseases running in the family and more. From a pharma perspective, this means insights and information related to drugs in terms of their composition, their strength, dosage, effectiveness, clinical trials and versions, mutations, evolutions, side effects and more.

For both the ends to meet effectively, the right drug has to be prescribed to the right symptoms and this is where AI and ML could simplify the entire process. They could make data interoperability more possible, detect mutations and diseases beforehand and suggest the right medication that doctors could verify and then prescribe. Prescriptive and predictive analytics could work in tandem for this.

Pharma and life science companies could immensely cut down on their budget and time on product development by implementing the benefits and risk management phase. This is a systematic process that involves assessment, controlled communication and review of risks and benefits of the final product under development. This report gives a clear idea on the quality of the product and paves the way for optimized communication, reduced budget as it eliminates assumption and brings in data-driven decisions, simplified escalation management and more.

The future is gradually unfolding right in front of our eyes. Our smartphones have functionalities that could monitor and track our health. Wearable devices like FitBits, smart pacemakers and more can be connected with our smartphones (through apps) to consistently track health details and use predictive analytics to signal when something is about to go wrong.

This signal could notify doctors and family registered on the phone along with electronic health records for physicians and specialists to work on without relying on other sources of information. If you didn’t know, devices like Apple Watch have saved people from heart attacks by predicting minutes before the incident.

The term RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation and involves the deployment of artificially intelligent bots and robots to take care of complex processes and mechanisms. In clinical trials, RPAs can be used to minimize the time required to successfully complete trials, increase success ratios, patient matching, co-vigilance, regulatory processes and more. They are also used to automate supply-chain processes in pharma. RPA helps save time and millions annually on expenses like trials, retrials, fines and legal expenses and more.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has been a household name for decades. People across the world are familiar with the brand, its value and product quality. Running over 250 companies under its name, it recently reidentified itself into a healthtech innovator as well.

It brought in tech implementations to improve patient care and healthcare outcomes. To get started, it rolled out diverse digital tools that guides patients in their healthcare journey with the help of technology and clinical knowledge.

For instance, it rolled out an app called Remote Assessment in Rheumatoid Arthritis that leveraged the potential of a wearable device like FitBit. By consistently monitoring and collecting health information through the device, the app processed the data to assess and notify the effect of the medication in the patient and tell them if their condition is worsening or improving.

To help people suffering from diabetes, it also rolled out an app called Reveal, which allows patients to monitor and control their blood sugar levels. This works in tandem with J&J’s one-touch glucometer.

The company is also venturing into robotics by developing cost-efficient surgical robots. By collaborating with Verb Surgical for this purpose, it aims to perform over 75 to 90% of the surgeries in the future with the help of robots. Currently, the number is less than 5%.

The life science and pharma segments have an interesting future ahead of them with increased integrations of technologies like Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, RPAs, Internet of Medical Things and more. As the race to drug discovery increases, we can also see the introduction of Blockchain in pharma to make drug manufacturing, patents, chemical compositions, synthesis processes more discreet and internal.

Complaint management would also involve the deployment of bots that could mimic human interaction with accurate information. Data analytics would be at the fulcrum of most processes from patient care and drug research and development to marketing. We would also witness the onset of tech like augmented reality and virtual reality for educational and research purposes to study molecular composition and crystal structures in detail.

How exciting does that sound?

The world of life science and pharma could be chaotic from outside but the rewards are priceless. Imagine when a Big Pharma cracks a vaccine for Covid-19 after months of internal struggle. If you’re someone who aspires to make a change in the world with your pharma or life science idea, the first thing you need is a tangible solution in the form of an app or software application. And to get that developed, you need industry veterans like us.

Get in touch with us today to turn your idea into a potential game-changer in the pharma industry.