As digital transformation continues to sweep through the life sciences industry, we’ve spoken to Veeva’s team of global experts to seek their predictions for the major trends you can expect to see this year across commercial, R&D and medical.
Expert Advice
Cloud computing has helped life sciences companies modernise many of their business processes, but within this industry it is still very much in its infancy. The next phase of cloud adoption looks set to usher in a period of significant change, with the use of industry-specific cloud expectations predicted to increase.
So what factors will accelerate this next wave of cloud adoption for life sciences? For commercial teams, digital transformation and industry collaboration will be top priorities for continued modernisation. In R&D, the increased expansion into secondary markets and a growing ecosystem of complex stakeholders in clinical, regulatory, and quality will lead many organisations to break down siloes and unify their systems for better collaboration.
According to Veeva, 2017 will see a sustained, industry-wide focus on transformational change. Let’s dig a little deeper and hear some of the specific predictions from the Veeva team:
Paul Shawah, vice president, Commercial Cloud
Cloud innovation and adoption will modernise commercial models
Many aspects of the commercial business model are still “pre-internet” and ready for disruption. Think taxi cabs before Uber, hotels before Airbnb or retail before Amazon. This way of working is forcing many life sciences companies to reinvent the wheel in multiple areas: every brand across the company develops its own website, digital engagement strategies vary from country to country, and key opinion leaders are identified from scratch for each new launch.
Life sciences will continue to shift to cloud-based, unified solutions to address these inefficiencies, enable end-to-end processes, and streamline commercial operations. Commercial teams will move to a single platform to manage content and digital engagement to deliver a more coordinated, valuable customer experience across many touch points.
Industry collaboration will make it easier for HCPs to work with life sciences
The rise of specialty medicine is creating a greater need for healthcare professionals (HCPs) to have more timely and tailored information, and they have greater expectations to engage through the digital channels they prefer. However, there is too much friction that makes information access difficult. For example, a single life sciences company may have 10–15 digital channels with different ways of recognising and registering the HCP. Multiply that by the number of companies with which an HCP works, and you will have inefficiency and frustration for the customer. The result is they look elsewhere for information.
Industry collaboration will make it easier for healthcare professionals to connect with life sciences companies. The industry will come together on the commercial side to define and adopt industry-standard processes for their shared customers to get the right information faster, which will lead to better outcomes for patients.
A new digital channel will open up between life sciences and HCPs
For consumers, making video calls is simple, and online meetings in other industries are easy and commonplace. In life sciences, however, the ability to engage online has been out of reach due to regulations and technology limitations. Facilitating a video call with an HCP has historically required awkward workarounds and multiple presentation technologies to share approved content, ultimately leading to a poor experience for both the field rep and the customer.
Online meetings will open up as an important digital channel between life sciences companies and healthcare professionals. Digital engagement will be easier and compliant with integrated applications built to meet the industry’s unique requirements and regulations. The use of this digital channel will become more ubiquitous and help life sciences companies increase reach to more HCPs and meet customers’ growing expectations for online interactions.
Data-driven actions will come of age
The growing volume of data has created tremendous opportunity for life sciences, but delivering contextual insight and making it easy for sales teams to take action is challenging. Sales reps today either need to go to multiple places to get the information they need – or they find themselves unable to obtain any quality insight at all. The workflow simply isn’t optimised, which hinders the commercial team’s ability to turn valuable customer information into competitive advantage.
Advancements in cloud technology will make it easier for life sciences companies to deliver relevant insight, when and where commercial teams need it, enabling them to take immediate next steps. For example, a sales rep out in the field would receive real-time recommendations to inform his or her next action with a customer, such as to send an email, make a call, or drop off a sample.
With this new data-driven knowledge at their fingertips, reps are empowered to make better decisions about their next interactions. Long term, the ability to turn vast amounts of data into digestible and actionable insight about the life sciences customer will improve sales and marketing strategies.
Robert Groebel, vice president, Global Medical Strategy
Medical and commercial teams will improve customer coordination
Life sciences companies will prioritise improved collaboration between medical and commercial teams, with the goal of developing deeper, more accurate understanding of their relationships with healthcare stakeholders. For example, we’re seeing companies in the immuno-oncology space launch new products quarterly, raising the stakes to have a collective view of all the stakeholders with whom they need to drive engagement. And since medical affairs and commercial teams often engage with the same stakeholders, they are tripping over each other, which leads to a frustrating experience for these decision-makers.
Life sciences will continue to make cloud-technology investments that remove siloes so medical affairs and commercial teams can work together in a responsible way. With tighter integration, medical affairs will be able to quickly identify key stakeholders and have a more holistic view of their interactions with commercial teams, so they can deliver a more coordinated and tailored customer experience.
Jen Goldsmith, senior vice president, Veeva Vault
RIM transformation will take centre stage
It will be an exciting year for regulatory as they prioritise transformation programs to solve operations challenges created by a changing landscape, including expansion into international markets and increased pressure to speed time to market.
A key challenge driving the industry’s need for RIM transformation is due to regulatory information being captured in a multitude of disconnected information systems. These systems currently manage everything from product registrations, submission content plans, health-authority correspondence and commitments, to source documents, published dossiers and more – resulting in duplicate data, documents and effort. These inefficiencies make it challenging for life science companies to respond quickly to health-authority inquiries across global markets, which delays time to market for new products.
RIM transformation programs will take shape and gain momentum as life sciences companies seek greater visibility and global alignment across regulatory activities and a growing ecosystem of stakeholders. These programs will include strategies to improve compliance and process efficiencies between headquarters, regional offices, affiliates, and business partners.
Unifying RIM technologies will be a key enabler to allow regulatory teams to streamline processes, improve data quality, and respond more quickly to health-authority inquiries.
We will see a rise of outsourcing in quality and regulatory
It’s no surprise, with the rising costs of drug development and increased need to get products to market faster, that life sciences companies are embracing outsourcing. This has been more prominent on the clinical side, where contract research organisations are now integral strategic partners. In the wake of high merger and acquisition activity over the past several years, the industry is looking to better manage costs associated with global submission management and production.
We can expect to see life sciences increasing their use of contract submissions and contracting manufacturing organisations for quality and regulatory, which will make both vendors an integral part of their business models. A recent report indicated that the global contract pharmaceutical manufacturing market will grow at an average annual rate of 7.5%, from $54.54 billion in 2013 to $79.24 billion in 2019.
The expected increase in submission and manufacturing outsourcing will bring added efficiencies and help life sciences companies bring more products to market faster.
Henry Levy, chief strategy officer
Cloud content management will see explosive growth in clinical
The rise of genomics and precision medicine is creating a data explosion that will accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions for R&D, especially clinical. Since the cracking of the human genome code in 2003, personalised medicine has taken off and now represents 42% of drugs in the pipeline, according to a survey by the Tufts centre for the study of drug development. In addition to the genomic data explosion, the harnessing of real-world data from wearables is contributing to the massive data-processing needs which make cloud computing critical.
In this new landscape, life science companies are challenged with managing all the content and complexity that comes with genomics analytics. Life sciences companies will expedite adoption of next-generation, cloud-backed content management solutions to solve these challenges, reduce IT footprint, drive greater efficiencies, and lower costs.
2017 will be the year life sciences embraces industry cloud
Results from the 2016 Future of Cloud Survey, which reports on the state of cloud computing and the analysis of future trends, revealed that half of all respondents are using or will use an industry cloud offering within the next 24 months. For life sciences, that means companies will adopt applications that are fine-tuned to business processes to drive greater efficiencies.
Industry cloud innovation and adoption will transform the life sciences industry this year, enabling new ways of working so organisations can capture new opportunities and continue to improve the quality of life for people around the world. We are in the golden age of life sciences, and 2017 promises to be another exciting year.