Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the entire healthcare industry, providing intelligence & corrective measures to effectively diagnose and treat patients. Mobility, Cloud, Advanced Analytics, and the Internet of Things are starting to transform the healthcare industry in the way they transformed other industries.
Medical device Manufacturers are partnering with Logistics firms to task the responsibility of deliveries in moving things fast. When pandemic like Covid-19 strikes, logistics firms are entrusted with the role of life-saving medical equipment carriers. These medical devices & apps help people in tracking their health issues starting from blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, medical history and recovery. Smart devices - smart watches, glucose monitors, diagnostics chips & cardiac monitors are shaping the healthcare sector; as remote medical consultations and monitoring are becoming part of the global need.
Opportunities Ahead
The best way to conceptualize the digital transformation is to describe it from the product lifecycle and product supply network point of view - how getting the medicines from development to patients will improve and change. And this is forcing the industry to capitalize the Beyond the Pill business transformation. Many players are already investing in partnerships and new business models with technology companies.
Wearable Technology for Personalized care: Sensors and Digital services, 24/7 treatment
Personalized interaction with the key stakeholders is the fundamental driver from digital technology. Sensors and digital services are part of ecosystem that help monitor the condition of patients and provides feedback to the doctors and the patient. This ecosystem helps improve overall health outcomes. The sensors measure a patient's biophysical signals, combining these with other data about the patient's daily routine such as—nutritional information, exercise information and allow real-time alerts to be issued to physicians and caregivers.
Smart watch apps & Mobile apps enable users to book for lab testing – with the option of labs or home collection, test reports. Also, plans to track users’ health records such as daily food intake and exercise and act as a personal health monitoring application. Patients take their readings, which can be reviewed by a remote expert without the cost and delay associated with seeing a specialist. Advanced data analytics that mines electronic medical records, including diagnostic results, medication history, and genomic, proteomic, and gene-expression data will help identify optimal therapies and predict how individual patients will respond to treatment.
Further Challenges & Opportunities
The companies are facing immense challenges in improving patient outcomes at the same time with the intensifying competition and pricing pressures. New diseases, business models and ecosystems are challenging the current way of business. The demand for next-generation products varies from patient-specific biomedicines to medical devices with the capability to provide patients real-time information about their condition and collect patient data for care analytics to improve the treatment.
Personalized care - Healthcare payers and other customers are demanding more and better data on medication efficacy and improved patient quality of life. These demands cannot be fulfilled by purely traditional means. A significant proportion of the pharma portfolio must create value more than just drugs. Omnichannel conversations with physicians and patients to get anytime-anywhere virtual care. The information paradox: the companies sit on a wealth of data, typically locked away in different technical and organizational silos. There remains a huge opportunity to create further value from data and analytics using internal and external data sources to drive superior results.
The Benefits
Digital Health infrastructure will substantially improve the personal medication development and care processes where the patient and care data are the new source of innovation and competitiveness. Access to personal medical records and how certain medications & treatments are affecting different areas of the physiological system will empower patients.
With digital solutions, patients will be better informed and will be contributing to their care with the practitioners to ensure that care decisions respect patients’ wants, needs, and preferences. Digital services bring transparency and enable patient-centered activities in the care between the stakeholders while preserving shared up-to-date data on the patient health and quality of life.
The pharma industry has an opportunity to connect and engage with potential patients online while they are researching the benefits of certain products. Pharma and healthcare companies can build a customer-centric change is for success, i.e. the right internal processes, competencies, and access to tools that enable a greater focus on the whole customer journey.
Digital transformation can help develop new business models to bring together capabilities that are concentrating into a critical mass and avoiding duplication of resources across commercial and R&D. Also, it will enable to manage faster experimentation cycles. Digital innovations can help effortless collaboration and integration between numerous stakeholders and develop solutions for new business models.