March 8, 2023

Pharma’s outlook on insights

Checking in on the industry’s insights management mindset.
pharma insight trends

Reuters Events Pharma recently released the Pharma 2023 Trend Report, in which industry leaders were asked to share their thoughts on key trends for the year. The broad theme was a shift toward thinking more holistically as pharma continues to understand its role within the broader healthcare landscape.

The experts had much to say about insights – how to generate them, where to use them and when to share them. As the leader in insights management, we wanted to know how the industry’s current conversation about insights lined up with our point of view. Here’s what we learned.

Insights enable better decisions

“Data and insights are like bricks and mortar,” said Phillippe Barillon, Global Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis. “In themselves, they don’t do much, but they are material to enabling better decisions across an entire organization.”

People don’t want data, they want solutions. – Phillippe Barillon, Novartis

The industry sees data and insights as building blocks – but without the right materials, the finished structure won’t be sound. We identified this problem as the life science insight gap, a costly and time-consuming problem caused by making decisions based on incomplete information.

Solving the insight gap requires a robust insights management strategy – a plan that ensures your team members and stakeholders have access to the same information and, ultimately, understand how that information relates to the key business questions you are trying to answer.

AI increases human understanding

“We are looking to data and digital solutions to propel us forward…our team applies AI and machine learning to integrate and analyze complex data from different stages of the drug development and commercialization process,” said Anthony Mancini, Executive Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Genmab. The goal, he added, is “to transform our understanding of cancer and other serious diseases and equip us with the key insights to help match the right treatment to the right patient at the right dose.”

Artificial intelligence is still widely misunderstood, even as OpenAI’s ChatGPT dominates the news cycle and machine learning in drug development continues to advance. Amid the hype, pharma leaders may want to understand less about how AI works and more about how it can work for them.

By understanding what processes could be improved through generative AI and ChatGPT in pharma, teams can bring the technology out of the realm of mystery and into their current reality “Being realistic about AI applications…elevates the ability of life sciences companies to make the most of the data at their disposal,” wrote Within3 CTO Jason Smith in Pharmaphorum, “and get products onto the market faster and safer.”

Patient insight is key to success

“Life science companies collect so much data and do so much patient research on things like patient journeys; however, I’ve found that often when defining solutions that will make a positive impact on people’s lives, we need to first better understand their lives and not just how they progress through a disease,” said Shannon Hartley, EY Managing Director.

Here again, pharma must turn to technology that enables frequent and meaningful patient engagement from the earliest stages of clinical development through launch and post-market monitoring. In Outsourcing Pharma, Within3’s Vice President of Product Commercialization and Training Natalie DiMambro discussed how teams could incorporate the patient voice earlier in the drug development process by soliciting feedback during trial design. “This could mean engaging with patients to get their feedback on a proposed trial protocol. You could also set up a virtual resource center or community where patients can find the information they need or ask questions of experts or each other as they participate in the study.”

One of the most critical challenges pharma can solve in the year ahead is understanding how to manage insights effectively. Get key strategy and implementation steps in a new resource from Within3 and MAPS. Download your free white paper.

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