Lifesciences - Incedo Inc.

COVID-19 pandemic brought with it a complete disruption to the existing normal operating procedures in most of the industries. The unprecedented situation due to the pandemic has struck some of the business functions disproportionately hard. The most impacted functions in the companies however are those where the workforces relied heavily on “on the field” presence for the execution of their work compared to those functions which could easily be converted into a remote working setup.

From the Life Sciences industry standpoint, the drug promotion via Medical Reps (MR) falls into the prior category. Although the industry as a whole has seen rapid adoption of digital solutions across the workstreams in the ongoing decade, their marketing efforts to the Health Care Providers (HCPs) still heavily rely on the Face to Face (F2F) interaction of the Reps with the Physicians.

This status quo however has been challenged by the ongoing COVID pandemic, with the social-distancing norms in place. There are estimates of 92% drop in F2F HCP engagements in April 2020 compared to 6 months ago[1]. It is also estimated that in the new post-pandemic normal, the frequency of F2F engagements will shift as much as by 65% to quarterly/annual rather than the weekly/monthly norms prevalent pre-COVID². This is indeed a massive blow to the existing Pharma sales and marketing approach and has seen many of the companies rapidly scale up their digital engagement channels to fill the gap. The use of these digital channels for HCP engagement has seen a 2x increase from their pre-pandemic levels.[2]

The current COVID driven environment has several key implications for the Lifesciences organizations in their effort to meaningfully engage with HCPs.

Impact on Sales & Marketing Channel Mix – Restrictions on in-person meetings have lead to reduced access to HCPs, canceled/postponed training sessions, and canceled conferences and events, all of which were major marketing methods till now. Pharma and other Lifesciences companies have to accelerate their sluggish digital transformation initiatives and enable a true omnichannel digital experience for HCPs
Digital engagement channel optimization – The digital omnichannel push needs to account for varying pysician preferences for the type of digital channel engagement, based on factors like therapeutic area, demography, and personal preferences.
Personalized, contextual messages for better engagement– Physicians at the front lines have to balance innovation and efficiency while dealing with the increased pandemic workload. As a result, engagement and interaction frequency with HCPs have decreased abruptly. With this sudden shift, there is a need for communication to be crisp and contextual for it to be effective.

This brings us to an important question of how the Bio-Pharmaceutical companies should navigate the current shock concerning HCP engagement and what lies ahead for them. Pharma Commercial Teams would need a strategic HCP engagement approach that manages the immediate COVID situation as well as builds capabilities for the new digital-driven normal.

As the Bio-pharma companies scramble to optimize their marketing efforts in the current times, they need to formulate a strategy which tackles the problem in phases:

Now: Immediate Priorities to manage COVID situation (next 1-3 months) – Set of tactical initiatives and workarounds to the existing HCP engagement methodologies, meant to strictly tackle only the immediate priorities around COVID-19 impact
Next: Accelerate digital capabilities build-up to drive Omnichannel HCP engagement (in 3-6 months ) – Strategic initiatives to accelerate and deliver a highly engaging digital experience for HCPs. These will fundamentally help in shifting and realignment of biopharma omnichannel engagement capabilities in post-COVID realities.

(Now) Immediate Priorities to manage HCP promotions in COVID situation

As an immediate measure, Bio-Pharma companies need to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on HCPs’ practice – Rx, patient counts, geographical impact, etc, and Field Reps access to HCPs. It is imperative that Biopharma companies create a COVID control room, which integrates external trigger impact data with internal data sources to truly assess the impact of COVID situation (and potentially other external triggers and shocks) on their sales & marketing plans.

As the COVID impact is quantified, bio-pharma can synthesize the same to adjust the tactical call plans for their promotional activities. The critical parameters to consider while making changes to the call action models would be:

Incorporate external COVID impact triggers at geo, HCP level
Defining and quantifying the digital affinity of physicians
Optimization of cross-channel (Digital & Rep) targeting frequency
Dynamic adjustments to the call-plan (digital mix, frequency) as the COVID situation evolves

(Next) Accelerate digital capabilities build-up to drive Omnichannel HCP engagement

Once the immediate priorities related to the pandemic are solved, companies can utilize the learnings and key insights from the pandemic times to further advance their digital engagement strategy. The evaluation of what went right and what were the misses in the earlier stage should also be used to formulate a long-term digital and omnichannel engagement strategy. There is also, a lot to learn from Digital-natives who have, highly effectively, leveraged digital channels to driven customer engagement.
Bringing these best-practices from Digital natives together with Bio-pharma context can help accelerate the digital transformation of the industries HCP engagement approach.

Best-practices and Learnings from Digital Natives	Lifesciences Ecosystem Context
Focus on differentiated HCP experience	Physicians have different interaction points, interests, and requirements including clinical content, CMEs, studies, samples, copay coupons, patient counseling material, etc. and hence differentiated experience enables engagement.
Volume and variety of data	Pharma has access to multi-dimensional physician data in terms of demography, preferences, prescription patterns, patient/payer mix profiles via claims, digital affinity to micro-segment physicians, and uncover preferences, behaviors, and personalized needs.
HCP/Customer Journey management and personalization	Advanced analytics and ML-based approaches can leverage the available data to predict intents, recommend interventions, and seamlessly deliver them via physician engagement platform and processes.
Omnichannel execution	Multi-channel interaction provides a foundation platform for delivering these experiences across digital as well as non-digital channels.
Measure, Learn & Improve	A/B testing driven digital engagement experimentation anchored on performance-driven, yet responsive targeting strategies.

To accelerate their digital transformation journey, biopharma companies need to inculcate these best practices into their HCP digital marketing capability. An integrated Digital Engagement solution will help biopharma companies create and deliver omnichannel personalized experiences for HCPs, by enabling real-time AI/ML-driven next-best-action recommendations and precision targeting strategies based on their preference and intents.

COVID pandemic is an unprecedented global event, which will radically alter our behaviors, expectations, and interactions. Earlier rules of engagement are now getting irrelevant at a pace that is faster than ever before. To maintain(and grow) their share of voice and engagement with HCPs, bio-pharma organizations can no longer afford to follow the “digital-addon” approach. They have to fundamentally re-design their HCP engagement framework, as a Digital-driven strategy, $to stay relevant, to stay ahead and keep growing.

[1] Sermo COVID-19 Survey Apr, 2020
[2] Sermo COVID-19 Survey Apr, 2020

Patient Health Outcomes as north star of Healthcare ecosystem

Changing healthcare environment is resulting in a global consensus that all medical products and services must provide evidence of value – improvement in patient health outcomes and economic efficiency. The stakeholders across the patient treatment value chain – pharma, medical devices, providers, payers – have realized that patient centricity and focus on health outcomes improvement are the “north star” for the industry. The demonstration of development on these dimensions has become an essential requirement for significant decisions regarding the patient’s health. The industry had made significant investments in generating health or real-world data across patients’ health journey to make rapid decisions, across various healthcare decision points.

Innovative, plus traditional, Real World Data for comprehensive patient insights

For the Life Sciences industry (pharmaceuticals, medical devices, clinical research organizations, biotech, digital therapeutics, and others) insights and evidence generation with a focus on leveraging the real-world data are becoming instrumental in drug development and commercialization process. The rapidly increasing patient-centric data is informing the process and decisions from discovery, clinical development, trial design, trial outcomes (e.g. efficacy, toxicity) to identifying best treatment setting, provider education, value effectiveness for re-imbursement and overall long term impact on patient health-life.

Today, Life Sciences industry has access to multiple patient centric data sources including claims data, EMR, Lab/diagnostics, patient registries, pharmacies, disease registries as well as innovative, emerging digital health data including wearables, digital implants, health app, social media and much more. The availability of these digital and innovative data sources has significantly increased the ability to have more comprehensive insights into patient health and effectiveness of the prescribed treatments.

For example, drug development is an extremely expensive process and often relies on an inefficient clinical trial process. Over the last few years, RCT data is being married with claim administrative data to deliver insights into the effectiveness of treatments. However, claims data will show that a patient filled a prescription but wouldn’t necessarily give insights into health outcomes, improvement in diagnostic parameter or side-effects. With various sources and abundance of patient-centric data, such gaps regarding patient health insights can be easily bridged, providing life sciences organizations the relevant solutions to advance the drug development process.

From Real World Data to Real World Patient Insights – The challenges

Having access to real world data is merely the start of patient insights journey. Analyzing these rich sources of patient data is critical to uncover numerous deep insights such as which practices are most effective in improving overall patient health life or which approaches, and interventions can significantly improve the effectiveness of patient care. With this view, several Life Sciences organizations have become increasingly aware of the importance of the application of cutting-edge data science and analytics techniques to derive meaningful insights from the complicated and vast real-world data sources, which is why life sciences organizations have started on their journey to analyze real-world data.

While this is a widely accepted thought process today across various stakeholders in the healthcare value chain, however, the execution capability to leverage advanced data science and machine learning is still a constraint. With the complexity involved in the patient data universe, analysts end up spending a significant amount of their effort and time in underlying data preparation and integration activities. These challenges leave behind an unrealized potential in deriving outcomes and insights from multi-dimensional patient data from various sources.

Data Science Platform to accelerate Real World Insight for faster action

With the growing demand for patient insights and evidence generation, a bespoke analytics or study execution approach i.e. grounds-up execution for each study, is an extremely inefficient approach and will somewhat hinder the speed and agility required in decision making in today’s health world.

Consequently, a Real World Evidence Platform driven approach which can deliver impact and value across RWD Studies and delivering patient insights using Data Science at scale is critical to enable real-world insights as a core enterprise asset.

Focused on bringing the best-in-class AI/Machine Learning capabilities to Real World insights, the Real World Evidence Platform also plays an assistive role in enriching the productivity of analysts in multiple ways.

Advanced Analytics (AI/ML) for Real-World Insights

Modern life sciences organizations can possibly leverage AI/ML, predictive analytics capabilities to enhance the insights generated from real-world data. With the ability to uncover insights from new data sources, formats (text, unstructured, wearables) leveraging Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation, the platform provides relevant solutions for improving public health.

Pre-built Machine Learning Model Libraries

Pre-built model libraries can integrate new user-defined models with the flexibility of external tool integration (e.g., Excel, BI/reporting systems), providing healthcare players with promising health outcomes and higher productivity.

Reduced scale-up time for new studies

The platform uses standardized analytics processes, which dramatically reduces the ramp-up time along with evidence synthesis templates for a rapid generation of insights resulting in an extensive array of desired results. Also, the use of automated ML model workflow and performance monitoring can possibly revolutionize how life sciences organizations can work to reduce spending and improve patient outcomes.

Improved Reusability

The reusable data features and models help build institutional knowledge for the healthcare players. Moreover, the pre-configured patient data model covering patient 360 profile, diagnosis, procedures, physician, Rx prescription, digital health data that is suitable for healthcare professionals assists in drawing critical actionable insights in the context of patient care. The platform also presents a flexible data model designed to integrate new, evolving patient data elements.

Deeper patient health insights generated at scale to drive better health outcomes – is a critical imperative for the Lifesciences industry as it aspires to play a leading role in the patient health continuum. There are certain limitations of current bespoke Real-world analytics approaches. Such restrictions are a serious deterrent in this pursuit and Life Sciences organizations’ ability to deliver on the healthcare “north star” – Improve Patient Health Outcomes.