PharmaVOICE: Vice-President and Head of Cognizant’s Life Sciences Practice Discusses Emerging Trends and Technology-Induced Changes in the Life Sciences Industry

“The biggest change driver in healthcare is the move towards outcome-based models for patients and moving away from fee-based service models, as a result of which, life sciences companies are focusing a lot on many strategic models and fundamentally relooking at their business models,” Bhaskar Sambasivan tells PharmaVOICE on the sidelines of the DIA 2013 annual meeting.

Sambasivan points out three key trends in the space: The ‘pill plus service model’ involving companies looking to provide bundled service offerings to their patients to enhance the value of drugs, fundamental cost optimization across the life sciences continuum, and move away from blockbusters toward personalized medicines and targeted therapies.

Touching upon the use of SMAC (social, mobility, analytics and cloud) technologies to pioneer new business models, Sambasivan says that social is all about how you get the big data to drive clinical trials faster or to run business better and drive productivity. Analytics is all about driving insight and knowledge from the plethora of data that’s sitting within the organization. Everyone has a mobile or smart device now; so how does one harness the power of that to integrate payers, providers, patients and pharmaceutical players in a much better manner. Cloud is all about variablilization, harnessing the power of cloud technology to reduce capex and increase opex.

“Those are some of the new technologies that are fundamentally changing the marketplace and the pharma business model,” says Sambasivan.