What is the most effective way to manage insights? It’s a complex question, with multiple variables to consider: which channels to prioritize and what audiences to engage, to name just a few. But in the quest to build a more effective pharma insights reporting process, one of the most critical aspects is how large amounts of data are collected, analyzed, and shared across the organization.
Analysis and reporting is a time-consuming process – one that remains highly manual, even as business intelligence in pharma becomes more commonplace. But where dashboards and charts will tell you how many of this and what percentage of that, more advanced tools can deliver faster reporting and unbiased suggestions on what to do next, moving you toward decision points faster than ever.
The evolution of insight gathering in pharma
In large part, insight gathering still relies on information exchanged during KOL engagement. But now, these engagements are more global, helping shape the scientific narrative across the lifetime of a product. Pharma organizations consider these expert contributions alongside other channels and sources of information, including social media platforms, online communities, patient advocacy organizations, and patients themselves.
More channels mean more data, which must be collated, analyzed, and shared before it can be useful to pharma teams. Pharma teams approach this in various ways, from spreadsheets and data visualization platforms to analytics software and virtual engagement tools. But whatever the process, no matter the tool – it doesn’t seem to be working terribly well for anyone. In fact, just 9% of pharma teams use 75-100% of the data they collect to generate insights.
This happens for several reasons:
- Siloed insights across different teams, in different systems
- Complex global organizations and different regulatory environments
- Increased pace of innovation and proliferation of channels/data
But regardless of why it happens, there are serious implications.
The consequences of delayed or incorrect insight-gathering
Delayed insights bog down decision-making processes. At a minimum, this can cause inefficiencies and missed internal deadlines. More serious consequences might include delayed product launches or getting beat by the competition. These setbacks often reverberate throughout the organization and can be very costly.
But on a day-to-day level, the impact is still significant. For example, a time and motion study from a top pharma company revealed the time cost involved in traditional reporting. The company found that just one part of the reporting process took up to 185 hours per month. Now multiply that impact by several team members on an annual basis.
How many hours are you spending on manual processing instead of strategic work? And how much is that slowing you down?
Tackling challenges and tech innovations
New technology promises to alleviate these problems by automating the most time-consuming parts of insights management and enabling you to work faster and more accurately. These solutions include:
- Software for identifying and connecting with the right KOLs
- Smarter virtual engagement platforms augmented by artificial intelligence (AI)
- Social media monitoring
The potential of AI in pharma spans the entire drug development lifecycle, from processing large amounts of trial data to ingesting unstructured information like transcripts, notes, and observations and suggesting next steps for further refinement and next steps.
Many pharma organizations are still in the exploratory phase of AI adoption and have questions about AI’s safety relative to intellectual property, privacy, and compliance. But AI-powered solutions designed specifically for life science organizations can produce accurate and unbiased reports and actionable recommendations, which could have remarkable implications on the agility and efficiency of pharma teams, reducing workload by 90% over manual processes.
Learn more about how AI-powered solutions work for insights management in the pharmaceutical industry. You can also listen to a discussion about the challenges of insights analysis and reporting between MAPS’ Garth Sundem and Within3 CEO Lance Hill in an episode of the Elevate podcast.
