Featured in: Reuters Events Pharma — Pharma’s race for competitive advantage
Shape the Company
Leveraging multimodal datasets to understand patients more holistically and segment them earlier for swifter and smarter trial selection is one clear example of the dividends that an agile, digital-first approach can pay, says Shwen Gwee, digital health consultant and former VP and Head of Global Digital Strategy at BMS, “The ability to accelerate and enhance the discovery process could be huge.”
Helping take trials closer to the patient is another opportunity arising from these new organisational approaches, potentially increasing patient convenience, lowering patient burden and thereby driving greater trial retention and success rates, adds Gwee. “We will be able to collect data at a higher resolution with remote monitoring tools to drive an understanding of what happens between visits, offering new insights.”
New Approaches Needed
Pharma has seldom taken the right approach to aligning people to the cultural and mindset changes required to address these opportunities. Process, people, mindset and culture all matter here, not just the technology aspects, says Gwee. “When you think of it as a business transformation it is more than ‘how we do what we do now, but using a digital platform.’ More than 50% of the job is culture change. What we are actually doing is a business transformation powered by digital.”
Deciding where digital leadership resides in the organisation is key to driving the kind of change needed here. Unfortunately, the answers to where digital transformations should be led from within the organisation are not simple and will vary by company.
Pharma is still trying to find what works. The chief digital officer role offered mixed results and now pharma is experimenting with the chief technology officer role, says Gwee. Is this just another two to three-year transformation drive that will fail to deliver the hoped-for outcomes?
Embedding Digital Capabilities
One significant challenge here is that the culture change and mindset change required to embed the necessary digital capabilities and to drive effective digital transformation over time is hard to effect in existing corporate structures.
The leaders of the future have too strong an incentive to follow traditional pharma career structures, says Gwee. “There is very little incentive to focus on a vertical like digital. There's no digital career path, therefore it is hard to do well and that is why we see people move between companies to build a career path.”
Life Beyond launch
This direction and co-ordination also need to go beyond the moment of commercialization. Pharma is not used to supporting products post-marketing and it must develop product teams capable of embracing the entire journey of digital products, including when patients use them.
Digital therapeutics, for example, follow a different lifecycle to molecules or even software, The software-as-a-medical-device lifecycle requires different management and even regulatory processes, says Gwee.
“We need product teams that see the end journey of the digital product. Often their work starts at launch. Understanding those pieces is important. Having product teams to oversee, guide and manage it especially post-launch is required here, not just handing off to IT for maintenance.
“The organising principal should be: ‘how are we helping the product and helping enhance its value? How are we coordinating across the business units as that product is developed and commercialised?””