Top Life Sciences Trends to Watch for in 2017
We sat down with our team of Veeva experts to get their thoughts on the trends that will have the most impact on life sciences organizations across commercial, R&D, and medical. Here’s what to expect in 2017.
While cloud computing has helped life sciences companies modernize many of their business processes, we are still in the early innings. The next phase of cloud adoption will usher in an era of transformation throughout the industry.
Specifically, the use of industry-specific cloud applications is expected to increase, with half of the respondents of the Future of Cloud Computer Survey indicating they are 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.
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 modernization. In R&D, the increased expansion into secondary markets and a growing ecosystem of complex stakeholders in clinical, regulatory, and quality will lead many organizations to break down siloes and unify their systems for better collaboration.
Here are the major industry trends you can expect this year across commercial, R&D, and medical.
Cloud Innovation and Adoption will Modernize Commercial Models
Many aspects of the commercial business model are still “pre-internet” and ready for disruption. It’s like taxi cabs before Uber, hotels before Airbnb, retail before Amazon, or airlines before Sabre. This way of working is forcing many life sciences companies to re-invent 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 (KOLs) 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 pharma company may have 10-15 digital channels with different ways of recognizing and registering the HCP. Multiply that by the number of companies a HCP works with and you 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, leading to better outcomes for patients.
A New Digital Channel Opens up Between Pharma and HCPs
As consumers, making video calls is simple and online meetings in other industries is 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 a HCP required awkward workarounds and multiple presentation technologies to share approved content, ultimately leading to a poor experience for 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 customer’s growing expectations for interactions to be online.
Data Driven Actions Come of Age
The growing volume of data has created tremendous opportunity for life sciences, but delivering contextual insights and making it easy for sales teams to take action is challenging. Today, the spectrum of a sales rep’s insight capabilities ranges from having to go to multiple places to get the information to having no quality insights to use at all. The workflow isn’t optimized, hindering the commercial team’s ability to turn valuable insight into a competitive advantage.
Advancements in cloud technology will make it easier for life sciences companies to deliver relevant insights, when and where commercial teams need it, so they can take immediate next steps. For example, a sales rep out in the field would get real-time recommendations to inform their next action with a customer (i.e. send an email, make a call, drop off a sample).
With these new data driven insights at their fingertips, they can make better decisions about which materials and resources are utilized and what messages will be delivered. The ability to turn vast amounts of data into digestible and actionable insight about the life sciences customer will improve commercial’s sales and marketing strategies.
Medical and Commercial Teams Improve Customer Coordination
Life sciences companies will prioritize improved collaboration between medical and commercial teams, with the goal of developing a 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 they need to drive engagement with. And since medical affairs and commercial teams are often engaging with the same stakeholder, 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.
RIM transformation takes center stage
It will be an exciting year for regulatory as they prioritize 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 that manage everything from product registrations, submission content plans, health authority correspondence and commitments, source documents to 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, delaying 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.
The 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 are embracing outsourcing. This has been more prominent on the clinical side, where contract research organizations (CROs) 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 use of contract submissions and contracting manufacturing organizations for quality and regulatory, making 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 science companies bring more products to market faster.
Explosive Growth for Cloud Content Management 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, personalized medicine has taken off and now represents 42% of drugs in the pipeline, according to a survey by the Tufts center for the study of drug development. In addition to the genomic data explosion, the harnessing of real world data from wearables are contributing to the massive data processing needs which make cloud computing critical.
In this new landscape, life science companies are challenged with managing all of 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: Embracing Industry Cloud
We are in the golden age of life sciences and 2017 promises to be another exciting year. Industry cloud innovation and adoption will transform the life sciences industry and enable new ways of working and organizations can capture new opportunities and continue to improve the quality of life for people around the world.