Why digital solutions and applications will considerably reduce the significance of the “Share-of-Voice” market model in the pharmaceutical industry

Much more than ever before, the use of digital solutions, apps, and artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the agenda in many board rooms and executive offices of pharmaceutical companies. Those technologies will change the way how pharmaceutical companies develop innovative drugs and therapeutic approaches but also how they deliver care to the patients. However, the digitization of healthcare will have a far larger and more sweeping effect on existing pharma business models: it will deprive the established “Share-of-Voice” pharma market model of its importance and replace it with a “Share-of-Data” model. For decades, the number of interactions and contacts to physicians as potential prescribers (Share-of-Voice) has been the basis of the pharma industry’s commercial reasoning. For this, many companies have been building huge sales forces. A first blow to this approach has been dealt by regulations limiting the number of physician visits by pharma reps in several countries. The emergence of digital tools and solutions - and especially the associated data collection and analytics capabilities - will further diminish the significance of the Share-of-Voice commercial model and replace it with a data-driven one.

But how can these technologies be implemented so they contribute to the business success of pharmaceutical companies?

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Towards a Share-of-Data market model

Over the past few years, technologies have increased the speed of findings from biomedical research, single cell analysis or genomics and have opened up completely new therapy options for many diseases. In order to realize and apply these new opportunities, it has become necessary to find out and understand in a much deeper way the distinct biological and physical conditions of patients and combine them with lifestyle-, behavioural- and social data to end up with a set of reliable bio-markers. At the same time, technology, digital tools, and data analytics have provided us with the capability to not only collect data directly from the patient (Real World Patient Data), but also to consolidate and analyse them in a way that enables faster and evidence-based clinical decision making and personalized delivery of care.

Therapy decisions and approaches will become increasingly driven by the availability of personalized data and bio-markers and by the use of clinical decision support tools. These tools will be powered by clinically validated AI technology and respective algorithms.

For the pharmaceutical industry this has far-reaching consequences: companies need to ensure that their health offerings - traditional drugs as well as Digital Therapeutics (DTx) or digital care tools – are part of such clinical decision support platforms. This is what is referred to as a “Share-of-Data” market model.

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The importance of closely engaging with patients

Patients will play a much more important and influential role in the future. This is mainly due to two reasons: firstly, and as pointed out above, clinical decision-making will be based on real-world-patient data and patient insights. Hence, a direct access to patients will be needed. Secondly, the availability of digital assistants and applications will enable them to define a treatment pathway that is adapted to their individual life situations. Pharmaceutical companies will need to build completely new models of engaging with patients during all stages of their treatment journey to find out about their wants and needs and resulting care offerings. True patient engagement often goes beyond what is usually referred to as “patient centricity”, as it implies that patients are an inherent and firm part of research and commercial activities, rather than being regarded as an outside influential factor. Therefore, in order to build a successful AI and Digital Health Strategy and ultimately develop an innovative therapy portfolio, pharmaceutical companies need to get their Patient Engagement activities right.

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Patient-Focused Digital Innovation – Develop innovative therapies by starting bottom-up from patient perspective

Implications for pharmaceutical companies and recommendations

For pharmaceutical companies, the rise of AI and Digital Health has the potential to develop new individualized, holistic and data driven therapeutic approaches and increase not just the quality but also the effectiveness of therapies.? However, AI and Digital Health tools can only be implemented in a successful way, if they are fueled by patient data. Pharmaceutical companies need to build an ecosystem which allows for collecting relevant patient insights and utilizing them across the value chain in order to integrate patient insights in the decision-making process.

Since Patient Engagement is the basis for reaching out to patients, in a first step, we highly recommend pharma companies to assess the maturity of their Patient Engagement activities, including Patient Support Programs.

If you want to take a closer look at the changing business environment for pharmaceutical companies and resulting opportunities, please reach out to us.

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