Data-Driven Pharmaceutical Operations

Data & Analytics trends for Life Sciences

Companies in the Life Science sector typically have 3 areas to their business model. The first is creating financial value by investing in the discovery, development, manufacturing, and commercialisation of medicines and medical devices. Secondly, they generate revenue from product sales of existing medicines, devices and new medicine launches, as well as from collaboration activities. Lastly, they reinvest their profits in developing the next generation of innovative medicines and devices for future sources of revenue in the face of losses of key patents. We know from 20 years of experience in the Life Science industry that the effective use and storage of data can support all 3 key areas of this business model.

Life Science companies are increasingly developing or acquiring data gathering and analytics capabilities or commercializing anonymised patient data in order to streamline their operations, maximise time for the discovery and delivery of potential new medicines & facilitate the mining of patient data. Medical insurers, drug delivery device developers, pharmaceutical companies, clinics and leading internet technology companies are prominent in this. Find out below how we are helping the various departments within the Life Science industry.

Operational Challenges in Life Sciences

Vision for Business Transformation

It’s difficult to define a holistic vision for their transformation and its goals and priorities, which results in uncoordinated PoCs and projects that yield meager benefits. Senior leaders may be unaware of the transformational potential of digital and analytics, and of the serious benefits it can bring with its application.

Technology Landscape

The vision for the technology landscape. A clearer picture of the IT and systems landscape is required, otherwise it may hinder transformation efforts. For example, reducing unnecessary complexity in systems architectures and using dashboards that align IT solutions with key performance indicators (KPIs) can accelerate transformations.

Resources to Execute the Vision

The resources to execute the vision. Companies often assign individual projects to large and unwieldy teams that may make slow progress. For example, they may lack the necessary technical resources, such as data scientists, engineers, and business translators. And they may also lack the central governance and culture of collaboration needed to manage and coordinate deployment across the business.

Custom Messaging & Content

The pandemic has accelerated the change in paradigm from face to face meetings between life science sellers and their target audience and now they have to create custom messaging and content and deliver it to the right audience through the right channels in order to make sales. A well-defined analytics structure can prove useful in this scenario.

Data and Analytics platforms can be a powerful tool across the entire product lifecycle and services in Life Sciences. It can drive the next wave of business optimisation by transforming operational performance, shortening time to market, improving quality and yield of products, supporting targeted medicines and personalised treatment, reducing supply chain volatility, and accelerating technology transfers.

However, our clients in Life Sciences often face the challenges of dealing with multiple disparate data sources and managing data accessibility, managing the explosion of channels, ensuring continued access to legacy data, and adapting to evolving data ownership and privacy concerns.

Our Value to Commercial, Sales Teams

Sales, field market access, and marketing personnel within Life Sciences have access to large volumes of data within their sector, such as customer interaction data from (CRM) systems, prescription data, physician profile data and patient behavioural data as an example.

The major change sales leaders have seen over the course of the last few years is how healthcare providers (HCPs) interact with sales. These interactions with sales reps may still be in person but they increasingly happen via video, text message, webinars, portals, and email. There is now a channel explosion, in which pharma companies must navigate, as well as create custom messaging and materials for, an ever-expanding mix of sales and marketing channels to engage prescribers.

We help commercial operations teams use this data with optimised advanced analytics and expertise to enhance decision making, suggest next best actions, and improve the effectiveness of sales and marketing activities.

Our Value to Finance

CFOs and finance leaders within Life Sciences contend with numerous challenges, trends, and opportunities. For example, the extreme financial outlay of R&D costs, the marked increase in lab outsourcing, and the interest in significant mergers and acquisitions for investment.

There is a fine balance for finance leaders to navigate. On one hand, they need to protect the business from risk, however, there is an understanding that there is risk in the business of pharmaceuticals and if they don't take risks then they cannot deliver new drugs.

SDG supports the finance function by providing insight out of the sea of data that is available to finance leaders in order for them to make more informed financial decisions, where to take calculated risks, and provide them with end-to-end financial viability over operations.

Our Value to Manufacturing and Supply Chain

Manufacturing and Supply Chain leaders have previously suffered due to manual processes, legacy IT systems and a lack of integration which make it difficult for the manufacturing and distribution arm to drive efficiencies, prove traceability and compliance, and reduce time-to-market for their products.

Through the use of advanced analytics, the production and manufacturing teams can understand how machine settings, operator training levels, or raw material inputs are going to affect the output quality. In addition, they can predict any failures in sterilization cycles, identify and recommend the best running conditions for a bioprocess, and support with the advanced planning and scheduling for your production plants.

The result is a streamlined and fully compliant manufacturing process that helps plan for and support the objective of getting new medicines to market faster and safer.

Our Value to Pharmacovigilance

In an increasingly challenging business environment, the biggest challenges facing pharmacovigilance are the rising and unpredictable Adverse Event (AE) case volumes, increasing complexity and cost, a lack of investment in new technologies (automation) and process improvements, as well as shortage of well-defined metrics. All these challenges can contribute to a general decrease in operational performance and ultimately case quality or compliance

Pharmacovigilance analytics provides an opportunity to better utilise data, both to comply with regulatory authorities reporting requirements, and to drive actionable insights that can predict and prevent adverse events. These new insights based on internal and external information can also be used for the drug discovery process, and to prevent reputation and monetary loss from the withdrawal of the medicinal product.

The use cases vary such as monitoring compliance for adverse events as well as supporting analysis for signal detection. SDG has the expert capabilities to operationalise these use cases by either implementing the technology solutions for you or augmenting with your existing data teams to do so.