How to effectively digitize your pharma and medtech business

We are on the cusp of a new era in healthcare as four potent forces collide. These forces are decreasing cost and time of genetic sequencing, powerful analytics capabilities due to big data, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI); proliferation of wearable, connected devices and accelerating venture capital investment in digital health.

The New Age of Digital Health Will Redefine Our Expectations

This new age of digital health promises standards of care that will redefine our expectations. We are going to see care that’s as personalized and unique as our DNA, care that is proactive instead of reactive, and the uberization of healthcare as consumers demand more patient- centric experiences.

We already have a taste of this more personalized, proactive and patient-centric care. For example, Pear Therapeutics’ received FDA approval for their substance use disorder digital therapeutic, which shows improved patient outcomes. Doctor On Demand allows patients to have video appointments instantly, anytime, from anywhere. 23AndMe offers direct-to-consumer genetic testing and recently received FDA approval for cancer risk testing. In 2018, Google’s diabetic retinopathy algorithm made diagnoses as accurate as doctors.

Digital Health Brings New Opportunities and Questions to Pharma and Medtech Companies

As a pharma or medtech company, you can reap great rewards if you embrace digital technologies. Some of the biggest benefits include enhancing clinical trials, improving adherence and accessing compelling real-world data in real time.

While there is a huge opportunity for digitization, it’s also incredibly complex to launch digital health solutions:

• Cloud infrastructures increase compliance risk
• The evolving regulatory landscape forces pharma and medtech to invest heavily to ensure compliance
• Cybersecurity threats increase liability for pharma companies
• Inconsistent global privacy laws are becoming more complex to navigate
• Pharma companies need to build and retain an analytics infrastructure and a data science team to assess the data from connected devices and therapies

Digitally Transform Your Business Using These 5 Principles

To help you start or accelerate your digital health journey while mitigating the above risks, we have put together 5 principles:

1. Be customer-centric versus company-centric to delight end users
2. Embrace the concept of a minimal viable product (MVP) and the pace of tech innovation
3. Broaden your view of ROI
4. Build open, scalable ecosystems--not silos
5. Invest in developing unique digital health IP and partner for everything else

Accelerate Your Transformation with A Ready-Made Technology Platform

BrightInsight is our ready-made technology platform that takes the hard work out of building, scaling and maintaining digital health offerings. It is scalable, secure and medical-grade to help future proof your business from a regulatory perspective.

This IoT platform collects data from medical devices, apps and combination products, and applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to allow pharmaceutical and medtech customers like you to optimize your drugs and devices through real-time integrated data and actionable insights.

Find out more about our digital health solutions and let us know how we can help.