What does it take to lead AI and Digital Health beyond being buzzwords and turn them into tangible business for the life sciences industry?
There is currently no lack of people repeatedly claiming that Digital Health and AI will change pharma business models and the way the industry will do business in the future.
Yet, digitalization only makes sense and is able to unfold its potential if it is based on solid patient data. At this point, a number of companies became disillusioned with their digital strategies and initiatives as they struggle to integrate Digital Health and AI into their business models and work with patients.
This is why we approach digitalization from the patients’ perspective. In the following we suggest how to actively achieve and successfully engage with patients to obtain solid and good quality patient data that fuels into Digital Health and AI applications.
Engaging with patients – shouldn’t this be a no-brainer for life sciences companies?
Most life sciences firms would certainly agree that closely working with patients is a “topic of utmost importance”. However, to what extent this important topic is addressed and handled by organizations is very different.
What we have experienced to be one of the challenges for life sciences companies is to apply patient engagement across the whole values chain. Often patient engagement is implemented only in certain areas (such as R&D). This is mostly due to the organizational set-up within an organization which is in many cases still built around different business areas rather than mapping the whole value chain.
An organization should not just continue using the existing ways-of-working and put patient engagement on top of it, but rather start with the patient view and then re-consider processes and structures. For many organizations this implies adopting a new view of the patient and making them become part of the corporate culture.
A new view of the patient – what is different?
If we consider engaging with patients as a pre-requisite for AI and Digital Health, what are the differences to how many life sciences firms currently work with patients?
The new view of the patient means continuously involving patients into decision making all along the value chain and treat them as a strategic part of the business. These are long-term and lasting commitments that go well beyond organizing individual focus groups, panels or interviews or carrying through single patient reported outcomes studies or observations.
To avoid overwhelming an organization, we suggest to approach this often substantial transition in a modular and step-by-step fashion.
The following Patient Engagement Maturity Model (PEMA) has been designed to achieve this. It assesses the existing patient engagement work of an organization and serves as a guiding framework to develop staged strategies, measures and activities to achieve excellence in patient engagement.
The call for action going out to the life sciences industry – what do you want to be?
The question the industry needs to address is pretty much around “What is the role life sciences firms want to play in future healthcare delivery?”. Will this role come down to solely be a supplier of chemical entities or the provider of integrated, personalized care and treatment? Future business margins will certainly be achieved with the latter scenario. There is some analogy here to the telecoms industry during the 80’s and 90’s: telecom players during that time missed the boat on achieving a proper position in the value chain leading to being only bitpipe suppliers today.
There is an imminent need for the life sciences industry to address and embrace these elements of innovation. It is important to understand that Digital Health and AI go far beyond the technical challenge. They need to go together with patient engagement, data handling and often process transformation.
All 4 are instrumental for maintaining a competitive therapy portfolio & pipeline and being able to play a valuable part in future healthcare delivery.
If you want to learn more about the new view of the patient and how to incorporate it into your digital and data strategies, please reach out to us.
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