The race for competitive advantage for pharma today is about far more than just innovative new molecules.
Patients are increasingly active participants in their own care. They are becoming intolerant of high-friction, low-quality provision of care. Resource constrained health systems, meanwhile, urgently require partners able to help them do more with less.
Advantage in the life sciences, then, will increasingly go to those that can thread the needle -- developing new products, services and digital ecosystems in a new competitive landscape, while managing challenging economic and operational conditions.
When it comes to enterprise business strategy, that’s a lot to consider. How best to approach the process of addressing all this?
Start by dividing the transformation challenge into three categories:
- Shape the product
A medication or device is no longer the end of a healthcare intervention. The experience that surrounds it matters more than ever. “The pill is the necessary part of the solution but no longer sufficient. Patients and healthcare providers want holistic solutions for economic value and convenience,” explains Emre Ozcan, Global Head of Digital Health, Merck Healthcare. “Hence, shaping the right care pathway with orchestrated services around the pill matter increasingly more. - Shape the company
Modernizing the organization to be more agile and to make better use of data will drive more effective launches and enable faster response to emerging market opportunities. Leveraging multimodal datasets to better understand and segment patients for swifter and smarter trial selection is an 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.” - Shape the market
Increasingly, competitive advantage will also arise from thinking beyond therapies and moving further upstream in partnerships outside the organization and across the healthcare ecosystem. Recognizing this market dynamic is vital, says Merck’s Ozcan. “Our ability to differentiate [ourselves] comes down to the holistic solutions we work out with our partners. No one is asking for a single molecule anymore. They are asking for a care package with the right things done at the right time in the right way. We increasingly need to show that we are thinking beyond simply treatment and that we also think about the total patient journey end-to-end from prevention to diagnostics, treatment to follow-ups.”
Pharma has seldom taken the right approach to aligning people to the cultural and mindset changes required to address these opportunities. Deciding where digital leadership resides in the organization is key to driving the multifaceted change needed here. Unfortunately, the answers to where digital transformations should be led from within the organization are not simple and will vary by company.
Part of the answer for many will be in how well they can devolve much of the digital transformation effort further down from the C-suite, says Walid Mehanna, Group Data Officer at Merck Group. “Transformation is not something you can easily centralize. Transformation needs to be global and encompass the organization. You can’t do it out of digital ivory towers.”
Another challenge in building the new digital and data infrastructure is optimizing it to fit competing global and local requirements such that it frees business teams to focus more on customers and patients, adds Mehanna.
“You centralize what makes sense to centralize. I believe it needs to be a combination of mix and match with a lean corporate hub and then for every business and function we have a local hub with a local data and digital officer.”
Building a data ecosystem to optimize these competing requirements may take a bit more time to get right, since local parts of the business may not be as free to source their own discrete solutions from vendors, but it is likely to be worth it, says Mehanna. “In the long run it will make you massively faster.”
Embedding digital capabilities
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.”
The far more collaborative context in which pharma operates both internally and externally demands significant changes in the way teams are configured and incentivized, says Vyom Bhuta, Global Head of Commercial Innovation, Life Sciences at Cognizant.
For example, while most pharma organizations have been investing in the technological and data capabilities needed for omnichannel, most have yet to master omnichannel’s far more collaborative operational requirements.
“To drive through omnichannel, you need tightly integrated, multidisciplinary commercial teams to support global markets, countries and franchises,” Bhuta says. “Commercial sales and marketing groups have to work closely with market access, patient services, and medical affairs to drive a coordinated customer experience while accounting for compliance. Integrated within this team should be the business insights and digital technology group within the organization.”
Business insights and digital technology teams have an enormous contribution to make since they will be key to driving and making the most of increasingly real-time customer interactions.
The key to unlocking this challenge is an organizational one. Internal silos need to be taken down to enable cross-functional technology, data science, medical, clinical, commercial and marketing teams to be convened. “It needs a deep, strategic restructuring. One of things we are proposing is that these [multidisciplinary] teams should operate in pods organized by franchise and brands,” says Bhuta.
Such teams can operate on a national, regional or even district level, each with the resources they need across functions. This requires not just an investment in people but also in automation and AI, he adds. “To create a data insights ecosystem you have to invest in analytical bots, so to speak, so that an insight generation and recommendation engine works on a real-time basis.”
Bringing talent in from outside healthcare and the life sciences as well as being prepared to bring in external partners to complement internal teams is another worthwhile consideration.
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.
Cognizant's Life Sciences business leaders are committed to advancing science to improve patient outcomes by partnering with clients to drive continuous improvement in the way they do business. Cognizant helps its clients set the pace in clinical development, strengthen their regulatory infrastructure, modernize manufacturing, and increase market competitiveness. The Cognizant Life Sciences team provides domain-aligned consulting, technology, and business process solutions globally, serving the world’s leading pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies.
For more information, visit Cognizant.com/LifeSciences.