The execution difference

For the life sciences business and technology executives, digital presents a distinctive set of new capabilities and differentiation opportunities for the future. But the secret to success lies in the approaches they take for execution within their organizations.

Successful digital transformations in the industry will mean a thoughtful approach and method of execution:

1. Embracing a cloud-first strategy – Pharmaceutical companies have until recently been slow to adopt cloud-based solutions as a mainstream strategy, often handicapped by the risks associated with the industry’s regulatory implications. Unlike before, leading cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google’s GCP, have built-in clinical and healthcare assets that encompass machine learning models, integrations with clinical workflows and application domain-ready data models. A cloud- first approach as central to the technology strategy enables the enterprise to rapidly develop, test and deploy production-grade applications in service of end consumer (‘patient’) outcomes.
2. Automating core business processes and improving decision making with AI – A pharmaceutical company’s core business processes by design operate in an environment to increase regulatory compliance and reduce risk. However, the downside of this legacy is that it drastically retards the speed with which companies begin to realize the value of their digital transformation initiatives. By embracing a thoughtful automation strategy using robotics process automation (RPA) platforms like Ui Path, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere, technology executives can eliminate inefficiencies and simplify their core processes.Automating using RPA, however, is only half the answer. The other half lies in data science. By applying machine learning and NLP techniques, automated business processes become intelligent and significantly improve decision making.
3. Do-It-Yourself vs. Partner model – While gone are the days for Pharmaceutical technology executives to decide between a buy vs. a build, the choice between doing it all themselves vs. selecting a Digital technology partner for execution remains.
   The decision framework involves addressing a few questions, which include
   • Source of differentiation: What type of intellectual property (IP) is meaningful for a pharmaceutical company to build, and how closely will it align to the primary goal of improving patient outcomes?
   • Extent of experimentation: Does the right approach lie in tackling every problem from scratch or in taking advantage of partner solutions, using accelerators that have done the hard work before? Patient data hubs, pre-configured clinical workflows, patient journey models, and pre-configured machine learning models for specific applications, to name a few.
4. Open Innovation and Collaboration – Life sciences executives, particularly in R&D, leverage external partner ecosystems to accelerate their research pipeline. A similar opportunity extends to the execution of digital transformation in these organizations, where they go beyond traditional technology partner models to develop a collaborative open innovation ecosystem for joint development of new solutions at low cost.

Nitin’s conclusion:

Patient-centricity is here to stay. It is redefining the business that life sciences companies are in today and, with digital transformation in these organizations, will bring new meaning to who they serve, delivering improved patient outcomes and gaining competitive advantage in the process. Data, analytics, and a cloud-first execution strategy combined with the right choice of partnership models will place the forward-looking life sciences companies well ahead in the race to win in digital.