Why Life Science Companies Need A Digital Platform Now

The urgency given by the recent pandemic emergency has helped focus attention on the effectiveness of the traditional processes that characterize Pharma companies, initiating a review of the business model to integrate the benefits of digital transformation. A major concern for C-levels is managing the volume of data. The right way forward is to adopt a cloud-native approach that enables the creation of flexible, secure, and scalable applications.

Cloud-native technology is pushing Life Science companies toward a paradigm shift

The tendency described above is pushing away the management from adopting off-the-shelf solutions to address specific issues. Instead, they are adopting more comprehensive cloud-native technologies to manage the huge amount of data by enabling high levels of interoperability and flexible business methodologies (e.g., agile methodology) to rapidly compose new digital experiences. Pharma and Life Science companies will face the following challenges:

• Changing Customer Expectations: the new patient-centric healthcare paradigm requires a fluid and interconnected experience throughout the patient journey;
• Creation of Partner Ecosystems: requiring rapid and efficient sharing of information;
• Regulatory adjustment: causing fragmentation of Market Access and Reimbursement processes;
• Unscalable monolithic IT architectures that limit flexibility and innovation;
• Complex and high Total Cost of Ownership for technology makes digital services less affordable;
• Limited access to the benefits of AI, Machine Learning models, and Analytics.

Let’s see in detail how each pillar can positively affect the patient journey if addressed correctly.

Harnessing the great potential of clinical data is a top priority for Pharma

To address these challenges, Pharma and Life Science companies need to move away from the logic of monolithic applications where data are enclosed in silos that communicate with difficulty and instead create an ecosystem where data is easily identifiable and interoperable. Thanks to this approach, they will be able to face the market promptly by responding to patients’ demand for new digital services, increasing the quality of service and the effectiveness of medical devices application.

How to foster the change? Building a Digital Platform for the Life Science 

By abandoning the adoption of off-the-shelf products to address urgent needs, and building a digital platform to leverage data-driven decisions, Pharma and Life Science companies have to focus the effort on building an IT architecture characterized primarily by two main objects defined in this Gartner report (available only to Gartner clients):

1. A software layer that allows data to be interoperated and made available to business functions by extracting it from underlying systems;
2. A set of runtime services and modular components that help translate business logic into reliable solutions. Corporates IT Teams will have a portfolio of building blocks to create customized software experiences by reusing pieces of code from applications already developed. 
   

Migrating from a traditional business paradigm to a Platform Company approach is not easy as it will not be just a technological change, but also an organizational one. Relying on a technology partner who, in addition to a high capacity to innovate, succeeds in guiding companies toward the use of agile methodology is of strategic importance.

One of the leading providers bringing these skills to the market is Mia-Care which offers a state-of-the-art toolkit to build your own Self-service Data Infrastructure. The Mia-Care composable software suite enables DevOps Teams to build, release and scale new digital applications while substantially reducing costs and commercialization.

A Digital Life Science Platform (DLSP) is an architectural approach that enables companies to nimbly adapt their business and operating model in response to external disruption and change in business strategy. The DLSP sources and integrates functionality from internal and ecosystem partners to create packaged business capabilities (PBCs). Nontechnical and IT staff can use PBCs to compose new experiences.

Source: Innovation Insight for Digital Life Science Platforms, Published 12 October 2021 – ID G00756081 – 17 min read. By Analyst(s): Michael Shanler, Rohan Sinha, Animesh Gandhi, Jeff Smith

Conclusions

Investment in technology is certainly a cost but enables rapid value generation through the synergy of existing expertise and the use of cutting-edge digital solutions. Even as the amount of data to be managed increases, consistency, and fluidity are maintained through architectural paradigms that allow the maximum value extraction from the information managed by the enterprise. Thus, the main benefits of developing a Digital Life Science Platform are:

• Organizational adaptability and operational flexibility. By adopting a new technology paradigm and leveraging agile methodologies, the entire business organization will feel the benefit of decentralized governance but easily monitored by management;
• Rapid value generation from IT investments through the synergy of existing skills and the use of digital technologies;
• Increased capacity for innovation. By abandoning monolithic architectures, Pharma and Life Science companies will have much more control and ability to act when it comes to innovating to create new care delivery experiences;
• Efficiency in collecting, sorting, and using clinical data to create efficient data flows that can be used for different scopes.