Artificial intelligence generated plenty of chatter amongst the pharma marketing intelligentsia in 2018. Will 2019 be the year when the industry fully embraces it as more than just a tactic?

For years and years, pharmaceutical pricing has been under attack by consumers, professionals, and payers. More recently, the U.S. government has dramatically stepped up its assault, with price reduction proposals from Congress and stern words from President Trump indicating that drug pricing is a major ongoing focus of the administration. The 2018 timeline was dotted with government jabs at pharma pricing, as well as some attempts to take real action.

A sales rep preparing for her week isn’t thinking, What’s in my sales dashboard? What is my progress towards my call plan? She’s thinking, What are the burning issues in my territory this week? How should I adjust my plan based on the latest events and information that I have? Then she manually navigates her way through dashboards and reports to find these answers.

The market research company Gartner predicts that consumer demand for voice devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home will generate $3.5 billion by 2021. These intelligent voice assistants, plus other digital technologies such as the Apple Watch, are slowly but steadily being adopted in healthcare.

Ogilvy Health recently asked some of its agency leaders – in creative, payer, digital, planning, and account – to share what they’re tracking in 2019.

In the era of precision medicine, life sciences companies are transforming customer engagement with complete, accurate and up-to-date customer data.

Most pharmaceutical brands are really happy with a handful of their agencies, satisfied with some, and not too thrilled with one or two. TGaS uncovered four areas to watch in 2019 through its benchmark-based consultancy.

Med Ad News asked its sources for the Agenda 2019 special feature which key questions for 2019 we’d left out. This is what they told us.

AbbVie

Top 10 Pipelines To Watch: 2019 Annual Report

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The return on R&D investment for leading biopharmaceutical manufacturers fell to a nine-year low while the U.S. FDA approved a record-breaking amount of novel medicines during 2018.

With Congressional hearings on drug prices, proposed rules for Medicare plans and new ICER efforts to link outcomes to value, finding answers on how to price and pay for drugs is still difficult.