In 2016, the Digital Economy is alive and growing in a market near you. Leading companies from across all industries are leveraging digital technologies to transform their processes and disrupt their value chain as they look to create competitive barriers through a truly digital and differentiated experience. Whether it’s Uber transforming the taxi and limousine industries or Apple changing the way consumers access and listen to music, these organizations leveraged disruptive digital technologies to transform their respective industries.
But how can Life Sciences companies enact a similar disruptive processes and technologies given they operate in a regulated market? What can they do to enable transformation when approving a drug or product can take over a decade and billions of dollars? In my white paper, The Digital Life Sciences Network: Collaborating in a Digital World to Improve Outcomes, we examine many of those questions and highlight some of the emerging scenarios that disrupting the industry and creating unique value.
First, I’ve included some key points in this blog including examining the key trends that are driving the digital transformation:
• Empowered Patient: this is one of the biggest forces of change in the life sciences industry. Patients are more accountable, knowledgeable and connected than ever before. 75% of patients expect to use digital services to help them make decisions about their health as they share data and experiences through social apps with other patients to get the best results at the lowest cost.
• Scientific Advances: technology companies are continuing to make advances in science that are increasing the pace of innovation across the industry as organizations adapt the technologies to Life Sciences use cases that help create new, innovative drugs and devices, especially in the area of personalized medicine. Continued advancements in “omics” research combined with supercomputing processing power are driving a multitude of innovations.
• Healthcare Reforms: healthcare reforms are driving a stronger focus not only on cost-effective therapies but also on higher efficacy and improved patient outcomes. We’re seeing a huge push for value-based care and outcome-based payment models that are fundamentally different from traditional fee-for-service models.
• New Competitors: we’re also seeing new competitors from across the technology landscape emerge. Companies like GE, Apple, and Google are disrupting traditional health markets as industry boundaries begin to blur.
Clearly, these trends suggest a radical departure from today’s “blockbuster” drug and fee-for-service health market. But are you prepared to adapt your business models and processes to compete and thrive? To do this, you’ll need to be prepared to leverage a digital health sciences network using the latest digital innovations. For example, patients are more connected than ever, as sensors and devices allow you to capture data and new insights from across the health sciences value chain. When this data flows through the network, organizations achieve unprecedented collaboration between patient, physician, provider, and producer that will dramatically improve outcomes.
At the same time, digitization makes it possible to drive insights across the value chains. For example, using sophisticated algorithms on the large amounts of data enables predictive alerts and notifications, signal detection on adverse reactions, and remote monitoring, all of which provide new therapeutic insights essential in an outcome-based economy while the rapid growth of personalized medicine create a “segment of one” therapeutic focus as opposed to the mass marketed products that have traditionally been offered. Interactions in R&D, manufacturing, and clinical care are moving to new, cloud-based collaboration platforms, where numerous organizations, physicians, and patients can be connected in a matter of hours for faster, easier, and more cost-effective collaborations. New security technologies are making it much safer for digital organizations to operate – which is key for life sciences organizations that must protect sensitive patient, clinical, and product data.
Forward-looking companies are using these digital innovations to essentially “reimagine” the new and holistic business models where patients, physicians, providers, and producers collaborate to achieve one common goal: improved patient outcomes. Examples of the new business models would include:
• Outcome based healthcare solutions where life sciences companies market “health outcomes” by using their products and services in more holistic and innovative ways that focus on the outcome of the patient rather than the cost of a product or service. Amgen recently announced a outcome based payment for its new anti-cholesterol drug Repatha while Merck recently reached agreement with Cigna that created diabetes drug pricing partially based on whether health-outcome data shows that patients can better control their blood sugar levels
• Medical information solutions allow manufacturers to provide medical devices and equipment as a service instead of the more traditional unit cost model. This would include infrastructure to allow the device or equipment to operate more effectively while also providing an opportunity for the manufacturer to include their experience as part of the deliverable of the product.
• Personalized medicine solutions develop holistic therapies that provide highly effective treatments to specific patient populations typically defined at a bio-marker level. The bio-marker allows the manufacturer to create a personalized treatment for the patient grouping that will have much higher success rates than previous treatment protocols.
It is truly a remarkable time in Life Sciences and please review my white paper that goes into more detail on the continued Digital Transformation that is taking place across the Life Sciences industry.