The BrightInsight Digital Health C-Suite Series is now in its fifth year. Launched at the JPM 2019 Healthcare Conference, the vision for the series was to have in-depth, candid conversations with leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem on the most important trends and innovations shaping the future of digital health. I was honored to return to the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center for interviews with some of the brightest minds in tech, pharma and investing to discuss the power and potential of GenAI across every aspect of pharma.
Our guests included Emmanuel Frenehard, Chief Digital Officer, Sanofi, Justin Butler, Partner, Eclipse Ventures, Don Jones, Operating Partner, Takeda Digital Health Ventures and Founder and Chair, IMPACT Virtual First Healthcare, Stephen Ranjan, Vice President of Digital Health, Roche Personalized Healthcare Division, Amar Goel, CEO and Co-founder, Bito, and our own Kal Patel, MD, CEO and Co-Founder, BrightInsight and Ashish Agrawal, Chief Technology Officer, BrightInsight
…And we covered a lot of ground with our experts. Here are just a few highlights:
Sanofi’s Chief Digital Officer, Emanuel Frenehard talked about the key areas Sanofi thinks are important for leveraging AI. From streamlining tasks in the manufacturing process, to generating documentation in clinical trials to speed up the process.
There’s also a role in what he calls "employee empowerment and how can you improve productivity with generative AI… And so you spend more of your time doing these things that are high value, high complexity, and let the bots do the legwork." Last, but not least, engaging HCPs, patients, caregivers, because "we think that there's a role to play, and on that one we're going to go bold."
There’s a big role for AI in patient engagement and support. Don Jones, Operating Partner, Takeda Digital Health Ventures and Founder and Chair, IMPACT Virtual First Healthcare, discussed AI’s role in supporting "virtual first care practices". He suggests that AI can help automate functions like identifying the appropriate therapy for a particular patient based on their longitudinal medical records across all of their providers, or administrative functions like pre-authorizations.
He also noted, "it's not only helping the physicians identify what therapies are going to be the right one for that particular patient, but really managing that patient long term and helping that process go as smoothly as possible and keeping that patient as engaged with not only their practitioner but engaged with the therapy."
Several of our speakers talked about why platforms are critical to building digital solutions and leveraging AI.
As Don put it, "I think the platform concept is growing in requirement for pharma because the complexities of the therapies are growing. It's becoming important that pharma companies get involved with the care management that goes along with the therapy."
Across the board, our Digital Health C-Suite Series guests touted the potential of digital and AI to impact the patient experience. From providing a virtual medical assistant via an app to helping patients better manage their care, to closed loop systems where the drug, the device, and the software as a medical device (SaMD) all work together to help deliver better outcomes, – there’s tremendous opportunity to engage patients and improve outcomes.
We will be rolling out the rest of the interviews over the coming weeks – so stay tuned!