World's Biggest Pharma Companies Go Digital – Summary

In recent weeks, we have examined more than two dozen of the largest pharma companies from the perspective of how they use digital solutions and what digital health investments they make. These pharmaceutical giants have long-term strategies that, when the time comes, will alter our lives entirely. So it is critical that we know where they stand and how they imagine our common future – for it will become our reality.

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• Digital Health Interests Of Pharma Giants Boehringer Ingelheim, Takeda, Astrazeneca, Amgen And Roche

The common grounds

Our research on the 14 most important pharma companies that have digital solutions brought four issues to the spotlight that are at the focal point of their development. One is how they relate to patients through digital therapeutics, and the other is how they cooperate with technology companies in order to become more successful in the market.?

1. Digital therapeutics

We clearly need to begin with Digital Therapeutics (Dtx). It stands out in its importance as?pharmaceutical companies see this as a new technology capable of altering their approach to patients and customers. Digital therapeutics (Dtx) as the Digital Therapeutics Alliance explains, “deliver medical interventions directly to patients using evidence-based, clinically evaluated software to treat, manage, and prevent a broad spectrum of diseases and disorders.”?

Pharmaceutical companies see this as new technology that could possibly be particularly beneficial for them. The concept is that a digital healthcare technology (whether an application, sensor, process or even service) is combined with an existing drug, adding real value to the patients; but it also means that the technology itself can be used as medicine. This is a strange and unfamiliar approach pharma companies need to get used to, but they see that it’s exciting and has business potential.

2. How to cooperate with Big Tech

All in all, I have the feeling that pharma giants have a blurred vision of how they could and should cooperate with tech companies. It is evident that tech companies have the ability to create tools and solutions people would actually want to use. Pharma has not yet crossed that barrier, probably that is why compliance stands at around fifty percent worldwide, not 90%.

On the other hand, tech companies want to explode into the healthcare business and feast on its financial benefits;?they need a door inside with a guide. I see the future in the actual collaboration between pharma and big tech: technological companies provide technologies that people like, can use and appreciate; and drug makers add their knowledge and content, experience and evidence-based background.

3. Based on evidence

We see a lot of investments in companies that are active in health tech. However, despite the fact that 2020 was a record-setting year in terms of healthcare investments, Q1 of 2021 spiked to a record $23.4B, beating Q3 2020's quarterly results by 56%, it is important to realise that these investment announcements do not necessarily correlate to actual evidence-based results. These investments usually span from 1 to 3 years, but our main question is that we seldom read about actual results.

We collected our thoughts about the quality and promise of digital health and A.I. start-ups and technologies in our e-book, Invest In Digital Health - The Medical Futurist's Guide. In it, we focused on answering questions like how we make a decision whether to feature a report or announcement on our channels; or how we tend to make sense of all the changes around healthcare when it comes to investments. We included 24 technological trends we find the most promising by also highlighting some specific areas that are worth following.

Pharmaceutical companies, therefore, have a lot of mistrust and cynicism towards such tech inventions. Due to the ordinances of evidence-based medicine, it takes a long time even for good technologies to gain entry into medicine and healing on a practical level. This dithering brings about business risks, making pharma companies more hesitant to invest in such technologies.?

4. From patient-centricity to patient design

Putting patients into the centre of care is an attractive buzzword for all. It became an industry-wide approach in principle, however, we don’t yet see the concept implemented more deeply into pharma projects to be used in practice.

I need to repeat it again: we encourage every organization, from the CDC to the WHO, every health insurer, pharma company and government to appoint a patient advisory board so they can all include patients into their concept, gain invaluable insights and embrace patient design on the deepest levels of decision-making.

Summary

Looking at these 14 companies we investigated on their digital health activities, we can draw the conclusion that none of them has an advanced, overarching digital strategy we thought they’d do. But this comes out of reason: by moving forward on niche areas in digital technology they have more chance for success altogether.

This is a very similar concept to Big Tech’s approach to healthcare; minimising risks and keeping investments under control and betting on certain directions that have the chance to be more profitable.