PharmaVOICE, US: Cognizant’s SVP and Global Markets Leader, Life Sciences Discusses Bottom Line Benefits of Digital Technology

“Life sciences companies need to focus on data, automation, and user experience to drive more value from digital,” says Bhaskar Sambasivan. “Business-changing benefits don’t come from digital pilots or proof of concepts, all examples of merely ‘doing’ digital. Instead, life sciences organizations must tackle fragmented processes and technologies by ‘being’ digital to their core.” Excerpts:

“Being digital means gathering and using data to support automation and deliver better stakeholder experiences across the entire value chain, from stakeholder engagement to the IT landscape. Committing to this holistic approach will generate the value from digital that life sciences demands.”  Key areas of the conversation included:

- Data: Organizations that convert the data that surrounds their processes, objects, systems, sensors, devices into insights and information will be equipped with the business intelligence they need to anticipate stakeholder demands and industry shifts.

- Automation: Robotic process automation, natural language processing and other intelligent tools can bridge gaps among systems that today might require a manual handoff, such as between an early alert adverse reaction process and a compliance process.

- Customer experience: Life sciences’ “customers” are regulators, investigators, physicians, patients, and partners. You must focus on each of these customers to understand their requirements and then deliver great experiences that meet and exceed those needs. That ability will become a huge competitive differentiator in very substantive ways.

Patient attrition in clinical trials is a huge issue: patients are not educated about what’s involved in a trial, so adherence is poor, and trial results may not accurately reflect the therapy’s efficacy. Solving this requires changing the patient experience. That includes providing better education, so patients understand what they will undergo in the trial as well as the benefits they could achieve by adhering to the regimen. It might also include data collection tools and smartphone apps to help patients follow the protocols.

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