Lifting all ships: Shared learnings to advance the industry

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It’s now nearly 10 years since starting my digital journey at Amgen. I’m so proud of that work helping to shape pharma’s early innovation in digital health. The industry has come a long way, and today in 2022, digital is a valuable counterpart to traditional therapies and more of a must-have than a nice to have.

In fact, many investors expect digital health dollars in 2023 to be about the same as 2020, bringing in around $15 billion to $25 billion. As an industry, we can advance even faster through companies sharing both the challenges and successes they have navigated.

Learning from mistakes

During this past decade, I have learned as much from what did not work as from what did.

Everyone building digital health solutions is tackling hard problems and we all have faced numerous challenges to reach any level of success. Greater discussion of those challenges, and in many cases mistakes, would help others avoid those problems and innovate faster. Instead of wasting time trying and failing at the same problem others stumbled over, we should share our learnings to advance together as an industry.

We are proud of our success and the obstacles we overcame to get here. We made some strategy and execution mistakes early on that impacted latency and quality of the customer experience. In the spirit of transparency, here are some challenges we overcame to achieve the successes we enjoy today.

Some of these were around different languages and international nuances. In certain circumstances, we let customers lead too many decisions even though we knew a different approach was required. We have since learned that clients seek guidance when taking a new approach, as many are with digital. After completing several SaMD initiatives in biopharma and medtech, we can confidently offer best practices for successful roll outs.

Related: Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) Solutions

We have had the good fortune to partner with many of the world's leading biopharma and medtech companies. Our track record made it possible for us to add new customers Sanofi and bioMérieux this year. BrightInsight is assisting Sanofi in bringing to market a digital companion application for one of its key treatments. bioMérieux will use our platform to develop and bring to market a Clinical Digital Solution for diagnostics, enabling clinical decision support for disease areas across its diagnostic tests.

Working with the CSL Behring team to solve challenges and resolve unexpected issues helped us develop the best possible app for Hizentra. This partnership approach also built trust that led to our recent enterprise agreement for building, launching and maintaining digital solutions for CSL Behring’s late-stage and marketed rare disease medicines.

By partnering with our clients, we learned what worked and, equally as important, what did not in companion apps for biopharma companies. We condensed our experience into our recently launched Disease Management Solution, which helps biopharma and medtech companies accelerate time to market with pre-built functionality that remains fully compliant across geographies and use cases. Client feedback was also vital in the release of the BrightInsight Connected Diagnostics Platform. This allows in vitro diagnostics (IVD) manufacturers to streamline workflows, drive innovation and help speed time to diagnosis.

These client collaborations helped us internalize the value of shared learnings, prompting us to create the BrightInsight Ecosystem. This group brings together leaders from across the healthcare industry, collectively focused on advancing digital innovation to improve patient care. We each hold different perspectives and share our experiences to advance.

All these decisions, while frustrating at the time, taught us valuable lessons that fed into the 2.0 version of our regulated digital health platform. We have invested more than $100 million in building a robust, scalable infrastructure for biopharma and medtech that is currently deployment-ready in 64 countries and counting (plans to add more in 2023).

Further, we have an industry leading NPS that keeps getting better. Working with some of the leading biopharma and medtech companies on a diverse set of solutions has provided rich experience and a solid foundation to continue building.

Where we are today is testament to not just the correct decisions, but our ability to spot missteps early and be nimble enough to course correct. As the industry enters 2023, I hope this spirit of sharing and learning continues so that all ships are lifted.

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