If any sector gets more flack for being slow to adopt innovative IT than healthcare, it’s the pharmaceutical industry. Yet, as companies have been forced to find new ways to streamline work flows and reduce costs, many are finding that some cloud-based tools could help.
Cloud software solutions are taking on several different tasks in the pharmaceutical and medical device industry. It can mean improving the quality of data for sales forces and providing practical ways for clinical trial site managers to communicate across a wide geographic divide. It’s also making it easier for companies to merge without the problems that invariably arise when data between disparate computer systems is aggregated. But looking ahead, there are also some intriguing applications that involve combining the cloud with big data from public and private sources and applying analytics.
Veeva Systems is an IT company in Pleasanton, California, that has focused on developing tools for the life sciences sector. Its Veeva Network is used by sales reps to ensure that they have the most up-to-date and accurate information about physicians such as contact details, social media networks they favor and whether their practices have been acquired by hospitals. It also helps avoid duplication. Veeva manages these databases, some of which are designed to be shared (gasp) between companies.
In addition to sales teams, shared databases are also helping drug developers identify principal investigators. Principal investigator contact details used to be considered proprietary information. But studies from the likes of Quintiles found that working with multiple sponsors improved investigators’ performance.
Among its early adopters are Eli Lilly and biotechnology company Accera
It’s the kind of crowdsourcing one doesn’t typically associate with pharmaceutical companies. The oft-repeated phrase at a Veeva seminar about its network this week was “pharmaceutical companies of all sizes are finally realizing that the phone book is not a strategic asset.” But it’s not just sales reps that are finding relevant applications for its software. Commercial operations and data management teams along marketers are finding uses for the software to keep track of the physician influencers in particular specialties. Interest in the company has been growing, underscored by an initial public offering this week that raised $260 million.
Quintiles developed a cloud computing platform in collaboration with Lilly in 2009. The initial project focused on principal investigators. Using the platform, they could compare different clinical trial design scenarios and see how each part of the clinical trial affects planning and design. It has since rolled out a software platform called Infosario, which includes about 20 different applications. Among them, it can indicate that a clinical trial is falling short of qualified candidates or flag up adverse drug effects. It has an analytics system that provides a portal to view data in real time. The portal can tap diverse sources such as labs, electrocardiograms and patient forms. It’s enabled through the cloud for customers to use in a virtual pay-as-you-go model.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
At GlaxoSmithKline, a spokeswoman said the company found cloud computing especially useful because vendors could make updates remotely when needed. Its sales reps use Oracle CRM on demand as do its customer contact centers such as its response center, vaccine service center and medical contact center.”We were one of the first companies to provide a fully integrated system that enabled our sales representatives to use iPads,” she said.
Now, it’s expanding cloud solutions to its human resources division where it is currently rolling out Workday Systems. So far, it has deployed it in Latin America and Canada with a rollout in the U.S. and UK set for next year.
What’s coming
Gavin Nichols, a vice president in Quintiles IT division, said the most disruptive part of the cloud evolution for pharmaceutical companies is realizing the pairing of the cloud with big data, analytical tools and mobile devices.
The industry is still in the early stages of evaluating applications in these areas. But think data mashups between public and private data sets and then companies using that information to deepen insights for their own portfolios. Companies could take public data from clinicaltrials.gov and model that to show where trials are occurring around the world. They could also look at different drug pipeline activities against different indications and relate that to internal portfolios to understand market competitiveness and make portfolio decisions.
The work the pharma collaborative group, Transcelerate, is doing has big implications for how pharmaceutical industry costs could be streamlined. As Nichols points out, if you think of the clinical trials pharmaceutical companies do from a certain point of view, most of the procedures are the same. If companies can separate the proprietary parts from the consistent bits,to undertake a common platform, that could be a cool development for how the industry uses the cloud. “You get the ability to undertake this kind of activity at a much lower net cost,” Nichols said. “We’re not there yet.”
