Commercial Cloud: Life Sciences Outlook Through 2020

Four years ago, IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer famously outplayed human competitors on the television game show, Jeopardy. Today, Watson’s power is derived from the cloud and 24 times faster, 2,400 percent smarter, and 90 percent smaller … and, consequently, being put to more practical use. In 2014, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center developed the first Watson-based cognitive computing innovation for oncology – clinicians taught Watson how to process, analyze, and interpret the meaning of complex clinical information. Since then, Watson ingested more than 600,000 pieces of medical evidence and 2 million pages of text from 42 medical journals and clinical trials in the area of oncology research. It also has the power to sift through 1.5 million patient records, representing decades of cancer treatment history, and deliver evidence-based treatment options in a matter of seconds.

What else does the cloud, this revolutionary technology, have in store for the life sciences industry?

The cloud will remove the barriers to collaboration.

Pharma has operated in silos for decades, with teams and functional areas isolated by an array of client/server systems. Inherently social, humans do well when in collaboration, and business processes naturally span areas and people. Yet technological limitations have created disjointed processes and workflows, keeping teams disconnected and limiting progress. Cloud technology will eliminate traditional boundaries. New systems will support how we collaborate and communicate. End-to-end connected solutions powered by the cloud will finally bring together actionable, aggregated data, compliant content, and customer (including patient) interactions, empowering companies with a foundation for easy knowledge sharing, unimpeded collaboration, and continuous innovation. And, since the cloud is a service, commercial teams, doctors, and patients will benefit from getting the right information at the right time without having to manage how it all intersects.

The cloud will enable coordinated patient care.

Coordinated patient care to ensure that patients reach their treatment goals involves many stakeholders today – payers, pharmaceutical companies, physicians, pharmacists, and patients themselves. All need to be aligned to improve patient outcome. Today, cloud computing makes the exchange of information and partnering among all participants in today’s healthcare ecosystem faster and easier … and will ultimately transform patient engagement, even care. Google, Apple, and Samsung are investing heavily in cloud initiatives for patient engagement, driving the development of more patient-focused apps and mobile-compatible sensors to collect valuable patient data and make it cloud-accessible to all stakeholders, ultimately improving health through increased understanding of drug use and effectiveness.

The cloud will create communities of data gatherers.

The wearable technology market is booming, with new, multipoint data solutions that track health metrics throughout the day, encourage patient compliance, and capture other valuable data to support the development of new patient programs and products. Similarly, the cloud’s ubiquity has the power to turn field reps into a reliable team of information gatherers – think of the wildly popular app Waze, where users feed up-to-the-second traffic information to the system for all. Like ‘Wazers,’ reps will contribute information about physicians and other stakeholders to enrich each company’s customer master with continuous, real-time updates through the cloud resulting in vastly better information, faster. This is the future.

The cloud will deliver derived customer data.

Life sciences companies are driving toward an integrated multichannel customer engagement strategy that now includes payers, physicians, administrators, pharmacists, and patients. Despite this customer complexity, the cloud enables life sciences companies to finally capture comprehensive data accurately and gain real-world, industry insights across all customer types and channels … not inferences from extrapolated surveys or limited data sets. With data that reflects true-to-life customer preferences, companies can interact with them on their terms to match their Amazon-inspired high expectations. With data no longer locked inside each company’s database, it can be amassed industrywide through the cloud to provide reliable insights based upon actual behavior. Commercial teams can then craft precise communications that are timely, relevant, and meaningful to doctors and patients.

The cloud will drive innovation at 5G speeds.

Mobile ‘offline’ apps are all the rage, but will one day be obsolete. Fundamental to this disruption is the ability to reliably link any device to the Internet and ensure connectivity at all times. This may seem far-fetched when two-thirds of the world’s population still lacks Internet access, and even in developed nations, consistent, seamless online access is a challenge. Major developments, like Google’s Project Loon, that leverage advancements in technology and materials science are being made to change that. Ubiquitous connectivity eliminates the necessity for offline (or pre-Internet) software. And being constantly connected in the cloud from anywhere will fuel real-time, data-driven decisions.

Without the typical hindrances of traditional software development, innovation will suddenly get faster too, potentially leading to profound leaps in medical science. With cloud computing, IT will be able to delegate much of that all-consuming transactional work to third parties and concentrate on the things that differentiate, the important stuff – the medicine and therapeutic innovation.

The cloud will gather everyone to the table.

Patient services programs can be isolated, so feedback is often trapped in disconnected systems. The cloud, however, will enable all systems – internal, external, custom-designed, out-of-the-box – to seamlessly feed information from patient programs to commercial teams and even inform medical groups about health economics and the efficacy of drugs. So, when patients opt in and say ‘I’m willing to share,’ this rich data can be used to make all programs more relevant and drugs more effective for each individual patient. Years from now, personalized medicine will be a reality and it will be fueled by cloud technologies.

The cloud will usher in an era of total transparency.

In a world where every speaker fee, conference ticket or consulting engagement is documented and disclosed to the public, data quality is paramount. Cloud-based master data management systems will not only deliver compliant, full value transfer transparency across all touch points, but also provide the opportunity to aggregate data and insights immediately for better, more informed, and targeted customer interactions based on a holistic view of customer behavior. Spend transparency is just the start of this journey. These initiatives will trigger a shift, spurring all business areas across life sciences to proactively improve transparency. Life sciences companies will continue to invest in automation, further enabling themselves to manage the challenges of global expansion in an increasingly complex commercial landscape. With the cloud providing global and readily accessible information, the game will drastically change. A central, authoritative source of customer data will allow easy, agile information sharing across teams and geographies, empowering customer-facing groups with the actionable data needed to make the right decisions.

Global analytics will drive communications worldwide.

The cloud will bring a new generation of global insight, allowing companies to scrutinize brand performance, determine content effectiveness, and gain customer insight from across the world. On the macro level, these analytics will facilitate marketing strategies tailored to an aggregated global insight. On the micro level, predictive, real-time analytics will be used to orchestrate better customer experiences by anticipating and influencing individual interactions.

IT will move as fast as the business.

Historically within life sciences, IT has lagged 9-18 months behind business innovation. IT was inherently limited by the technology that was available. As a result, the IT function became reactionary rather than proactive, and therefore less valued as a strategic asset. Ultimately, this has slowed the pace of innovation and marginalized the impact of technology in the life sciences industry. The cloud, however, supports rapid change so IT can stay current and even get ahead of the business to inspire new approaches. Many global life sciences organizations such as J&J, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca are realizing the tremendous advantage of shorter innovation cycles thanks to cloud computing. By leveraging the cloud, the entire industry will move a magnitude faster, and IT capabilities will grow in unison with the business for a significant surge in novel, life-enhancing drug therapies.

The cloud computing market in health care for North America is predicted to rise to $6.5 billion by 2018, up from $1.8 billion last year, but the predicted staggering growth comes as no surprise. Cloud technology provides new and affordable options for creating highly responsive, scalable systems that are more flexible, capable of adapting to the changing market dynamics across the global health care environment. Even a supercomputer that was once ahead of its time, is now being fueled by the cloud to revolutionize the industry. To find out what’s next, just look up. medadnews