Could pharma reimagine its entire clinical and commercial ‘value chain’ in a similar way to Alphabet’s lofty ambitions?

The sector has certainly been on a rapid transformational journey during these last two COVID years and there are clear signs that even more progress, and lasting change, is upon the industry.

The outbreak of COVID19 sparked a mass movement to digital systems almost overnight. From drug discovery and development through to manufacturing and patient treatment, technology will create new opportunities at every stage of the healthcare process. One of those opportunities is to improve patient outcomes through greater digitalisation of clinical trials.

As interest in, and support for, elements such as decentralised trials increases, a wider role for the digital technology that would underpin them is something industry regulators are looking to bring online. The FDA guidance looked at how digital health technologies like smart and wearable devices could be used to capture data remotely from participants in clinical trials of new drugs or medical devices. The US regulator provided outline advice on technology design and selection, how sponsors can verify and validate them as fit-for-purpose, as well as the sort of information needed to be included in trial or marketing approval applications.

Initiatives such as this will provide welcome support for clinical trial technology, but there are signs things are already changing. Early in the pandemic many clinical trial sites were still reluctant to integrate digital technologies, with cost and complexity among the main barriers cited, but the number of digital holdouts is declining. Looking at all the global interventional studies launched from October 2020 to March 2021, our most recent digital clinical trial tracker report found 67% of the 150 trial sites actively recruiting participants used digital tools to support clinical trials, up by 10% on the previous study, with patient recruitment the biggest focus.

There are some positive signs for the commercial organisation side of the industry too, in our most recent study on digital excellence maturity. Amid all the upheaval since 2020, and the overnight switch to digital that Novartis’ Theophille referenced earlier, pharma’s average digital excellence score increased by eight percentage points between 2019 and 2021 and, overall, two-thirds of the companies we surveyed scored in the Good or Excellent range. That’s no mean feat, when you think about the magnitude of change over the last two years in healthcare and pharma, and – as IBM’s Watson selloff shows – the complexity of integrating health tech into our current systems. But if pharma firms want to maintain this upward trajectory, we found several things they should be thinking about. To name a few, there’s still a need for significant progress to be made on behind-the-scenes digital capabilities like analytics and CRM, and firms must further strengthen their capabilities and more effectively communicate their digital vision internally, in order to get a critical mass to accept the changes in people’s jobs that digital technology triggers.