With the advent of digital technology, pharma and med device companies need to start rethinking business models and building internal competencies, or risk losing out to the digital disruptors. Often a company’s initial efforts are underwhelming, typically due to a narrow view on digital’s true potential.
https://youtu.be/p11IPRclMZ0
Hear BTG’s VP of Digital Innovation, Amanda Goltz, describe BTG’s approach to digital.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
Many companies start to engage with digital by creating drug-branded health apps, or building interactive disease awareness campaigns, but digital can bring so much more to the table. At BTG we’re taking a very different approach. We see digital as both a way of working and a new component of the healthcare landscape. Over the past three years, we have stimulated digital thinking across our entire organization, broadly considering how digital might add value, and encouraging employees in all functions and at all levels to participate.
We see digital as the technology-enabled services that can transform healthcare and our business—by capturing new data, for example, or improving workflow efficiency. Our digital team sits in the strategy group, rather than marketing or IT, which allows them to embed ways of working across the company, instead of exclusively serving as a commercial function. As a result, we can explore opportunities to improve our offering to patients or solve customer problems, even if they are unrelated to our product portfolio.
By focusing on patient and customer needs and encouraging all employees to “think digital”, companies can move beyond merely using digital for marketing purposes and enter a world where digital can drive new ways of creating value.
Embedding digital thinking
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.
We start with what our partners—patients, physicians, hospitals, and payers—value and the challenges they face. As an organization operating in specialist healthcare markets, such as interventional oncology, BTG is well placed to understand the real-world problems that our customers face, and what value digital could add.
One way we marry these insights with potential digital solutions is through our annual Innovators Challenge, an open call across the organization for innovative ideas with the potential to support patients or our customers. Crowdsourcing ideas in this way taps into the knowledge of employees who are working closely with healthcare providers and health systems on a daily basis. We look for ideas that have the potential to impact how we do business, how doctors practice, or how patients fare. Then, rather than trying to create bespoke solutions ourselves, we look to partner with relevant technology leaders to acquire or modify existing products and services.
Winning ideas become digital pilot projects, and those that succeed after the first year are commercialized. For example, IO Loop™ (powered by HealthLoop®) is an exclusive service from BTG that enables patients and their physicians to stay connected before, during and after treatment. IO Loop™ started as an Innovators Challenge pilot project aimed at digitally connecting patients and physicians, helping patients better engage in their own care, and measuring patient quality of life and satisfaction rates across their treatment journeys.
By providing improved pre-procedural and follow-up care outside of the acute care setting, IO Loop™ makes it easier for patients to prepare for their treatment, and to track and report symptoms. This ensures early awareness and timely management of complications, reducing the likelihood of re-admission. It also helps the care team to collect patient reported outcomes (PRO’s) and other valuable quality of life data and meet reporting requirements under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) of 2015.
A number of pilots will fail; if they don’t, we are not being bold enough. These projects are simply dropped within the first year and replaced with new pilots from the next Innovators Challenge. BTG is currently running four pilot projects, including one that has the potential to save lives by using data already collected in the hospital in a new way, to predict toxicity of a chemotherapy drug.
Driving experimentation
Another way we encourage “digital thinking” is through our digital Boot Camps, where different parts of the organization learn to use lean start-up principles for digital innovation. We have developed a digital rapid prototyping process which forces us to design solutions that genuinely meet the needs of patients and providers, and helps us to get to the great ideas more quickly.
Earlier this year we launched a digital healthcare platform called Oncoverse™, in a joint venture with Dignity Health, which was developed using many of the principles that we teach in our Boot Camps. We reversed the traditional approach by finding our hospital and software partners at an early stage in the process, and were able to quickly develop an innovative digital service that has the potential to make a real difference in cancer care.
While many projects in our digital portfolio are linked to our therapies, Oncoverse™ is a purely digital service. Oncoverse™ is a virtual tumor board, which solves the logistical problems and costs associated with in-person tumor boards, while still enabling consultants to collaborate to devise personalized treatment plans for patients with cancer—either in real time or asynchronously.
Crucially, Oncoverse™ brings patient-generated data about individual life circumstances into the cancer treatment planning process for the first time. Providing this data can help physicians to devise personalized treatment plans that lead to a higher quality of life for the patient with similar outcomes, and significant efficiency savings in care.
A pilot study of Oncoverse™ showed that collaborating to personalize a treatment plan using patient preferences and biopsychosocial circumstances alongside clinical data helped to save cost, generate higher quality of life, and alleviate suffering, as well as satisfying multiple requirements under MACRA and other quality of care measures.
The success of our pilot projects so far shows that our unique approach to digital innovation is making a positive impact. By thinking about digital as an approach to healthcare problems and leveraging the culture of innovation we have built in our organization, BTG is able to source and integrate technology-enabled services to meet provider, patient and payer needs in a changing environment.
