Insight by: Jon Warner
The rate at which the Pharma industry is investing in digitalization has increased greatly in the last few years and is set to become even more significant going forward and the industry hires experts in big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud technology, digital ‘apps’ and related tools and systems and platforms to manage internal processes more efficiently, just to name a few). Let’s look briefly at one of these areas and its potential impact on the pharmaceutical industry -the deployment of ‘Digital apps’.
A little-known fact is that most large/medium-size pharmaceutical companies already have developed many digital health websites and apps for both health and healthcare physicians and other clinicians, and to guide the healthy use of any drug they are supplying to patients. For a large multinational this can run into many hundreds of apps. However, many of these apps have a very short ‘shelf-life’ and little use beyond the clinical trial, for which they are often designed. This makes the article at the link below (& longer report it comes from) very interesting, not only for saying that “only 4% of pharma’s digital product launches regularly succeed” but that the appetite to improve this or get this much better is high and can have significant benefits to all.
To succeed in this ambition to deploy better designed and more widely used apps, it is clear there is a need for pharmaceutical companies to audit the many current digital ‘assets’ that they already own (all current tools and solutions) for their quality, safety, efficiency, effectiveness and efficacy (for patient and clinician). This allows the better ones to be utilized more broadly potentially and others to be ‘retired’. In addition, the development of new digital tools and solutions needs tighter research and discovery of the ‘job to be done’ (for health professionals and end-users) before new ones are added (which means strong digital health solution development expertise to be on hand to either supervise the build). If this is done well, the benefits to healthcare stakeholder professionals and patients is significant.